essays on my evolving philosophy

on change...

Tue, 27 Dec 2005 21:24:17 GMT

change itself changes. to say that "all things change" is a bit inaccurate because of the limitations of language. interpret it in the loosest manner possible. all things change; all change; change changes; change changes itself; all things must change; all things can change; all things will change... "all things" refers to totality - an absurd totality or reality. and even "change" is not so simple. does schroedinger's cat "change" upon observation? we know from studies of quantum mechanics that reality is almost essentially absurd - that the world of everyday things is an oddly stable layer built on a foundation as unstable as the decay of an isotope mysteriously linked to the fate of a poor cat in a box. change is such an unstable thing that it is almost a meaningless concept. yet i obsess over changes that affect me as if those changes were existential shifts of being and beings. therein lies the roots of possessiveness, of a stodgy science. it is not enough to possess things - we desire to possess even the changes that affect them. and so we see how even change itself is capital.

if a language of words is too clumsy and causes collateral injury, a concept of change as a commodity is just as clumsy and harmful. obviously the free must reject any notion of "natures" or "nature" for such things contradict even the most superficial reading of "all things change". but even deeper than that, the third ethical postulate has to do with the freeing of personal identity. it calls us to not be possessive in either of two ways:

1. to not fight to control "my" identity. identities are constructed geographically. because geography is always changing, it is ludicrous to say that i must have control over "my" identity. if i claim to own a house built on a land, does not the creator of that land have equal "right" to name me a squatter? just as a notion of a creator is mystical, so is the notion of "me". why do i take the external world so seriously when it does not regard me seriously? to take ones identity seriously is to implicitly recognize how little control i really have over it. national flags are waved in times of crisis - not security. the world is not serious. seriousness, importance, obsession, is a mystification of the real. only tools are serious - and few things are more serious than a bloodied sword. do not guard the boundaries of your identity with a red line and red blade. the border will change, the sharp edge will dull - all things change. therefore, receive freely.

2. also we must give freely. give everything to your fellow traveler. especially memories, knowledge, technology, experiences. those are just as much capital as as material capital. such things are material. all things change. what is a thought today can be art tomorrow. wealth of any kind should not be accumulated - all should be given. the third commandment is a fulfillment of the second. to learn one anothers' languages is merely a key. the complete exchange of knowledge and goods is the unlocked box. hold nothing back. no memory is sacred, no technology forbidden, no resource precious. what is valuable today can be worthless tomorrow. the free do not scheme or speculate or conspire. they give all they have.

an atom is never at rest. absolute zero is death - it is an impossible state. even I is an uncertain existence in a warped, unstable space. all things change. and especially ideals - they do not exist except as words. the idealist is but fuel for the capitalist's fire. ones beliefs should change with the changing winds - not as words in a sentence but as molecules atoms and quarks in a stream of energy, matter and information. not as a landslide of boulders but as a breeze of fresh air. the clunkiness of ideals makes them suitable for war - the war of capital - a corruption of the organism that leads only to death.

my friend today can be my enemy tomorrow and vice versa. nothing is sure so put no faith in gods - bow to noone. even I, the surest thing that exists, must change location. to stay in one place on earth will not prevent the earth from spinning and moving about the sun and the sun from moving about the galactic core. the very ground you stand on changes. how can I not change? so one should catch and receive and give and throw away capital freely - to stay afloat on the every changing face of the sea one should be light. and what is lighter than dance?

change itself changes. so expectations are not to be trusted. time does not obey the protocols, the axioms of our ethics. so don't trust time. the predictions of science are for sport - a game. they are not "truth". when the sun rises in the east tomorrow morning, don't go your way normally (there is no normal!). rather, exclaim in delight: "oh look! the sun came up! and it's in the east! look how the shadow it makes my body cast falls on your doorstep! my eyes follow it to your feet. let me step aside so that your legs are more brightly lit. i wish to see their beauty in two shades. yes, even your pretty feet, like all things, change."

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on language...

Sat, 24 Dec 2005 01:06:18 GMT

to empathize is to feel as the other feels. it is an aesthetic condition or state. to simply understand another is to internalize merely an abstraction of their situation. if i say i am unhappy, you are not compelled to feel unhappy also, much less for the same reasons. furthermore, you are not compelled to seek a solution for the source of my unhappiness. that is because you, at most, understand my situation, but you do not empathize. the problem here is found in the mystification of language.

a language without words is the purest. words lead to politics. words are the weapons of politics. with a word i take a scalpel to space and slice out a chunk. it bleeds as i toss it your way. "a pound of flesh! here! take it!" by the time it is dressed, cooked, served, and consumed, it has lost all semblance of reality. the language of sex is good. a kiss here, a kiss there, it is never the same twice - noone asks for it to be. a "word" in sex is given and received in a single act. meaning is created on the spot and response is immediate. the language of sex is good.

the language of gaming is good. no two frags are alike. each thrust of the rocket, each orgasmic explosion of giblets, each sting of the spraying bullets is special. a frag is a frag. but each frag elicits a slightly different flavor of moan and grunt or squeal from the player - giving or receiving. to say "it's all the same, dammit" that "there's no variation!" is to regard the experience as a capitalist. the capitalist has nothing but disdain for the aesthetic that escapes labeling, categorization, and ultimately, commodification. games subsume and subvert commodification. that is because games are the lowest abstraction of language. they are the most concrete art and yet the most virtual. this paradox is the source of tension over the place of games today. games are tactile, sensual, sexual. they are only once removed from reality.

the static arts are so far removed from reality that they lead to mystification. a moment of reality is captured in a word, in a painting, in a sculpture. but then they are interpreted as a universal - they are mystified. a painting simply cannot be. an aura of spirituality is attributed to such works - they are fetishized and artificially increased in value. don't you smell it now? the stench of the capitalist? is it just coincidence that the mystification of the static arts greatly aids the capitalists' desires to accumulate wealth? i own this sculpture which my hands have not made but you will worship this work of man's hands and that worship will be at my allowance! and so the capitalist becomes a priest. yes, all priests are capitalists.

the second commandment calls us to speak pure language. make no pretense of accessing deeper or higher truths through the use of words. let language be as aesthetic, as tactile, as sensual as can be. why is a shoe called a shoe? what if i wish to call a pair of my favorite shoes "the dark twins of a purple shade of evil"? and let us call the left one "die scharfschuetze" and the right "barf vader". not because the shoes are mine and i claim the right to name them, but because in order to engage with the other we must engage in a language game. one can never know another truly and completely. dispense with notions of truth and absolutes and ideals. but through language - through the creative use of technology, of tools, we can virtually know one another.

to know your language is to empathize with you. such a language is not abstract or systematic. if language is sensual, and if i know your language, i can feel as you feel and know as you know. for all we know is what we feel. anything more is mystification - mere jokes to laugh at. let us laugh together. i seek to know your language. i will teach you mine. here is where i like to be touched - every existence's language is a map of sensitivity. let us exchange maps - let us engage in multimedia foreplay. i seek, we seek to empathize.

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on existence...

Fri, 23 Dec 2005 01:51:39 GMT

the free understand that alone i am nothing. this is more than to say that "no man is an island" or "noone can survive in a vacuum" though they come close to this truth. to be alone, in this sense, is to be separated from space and all of its features. in other words, though i can only be absolutely sure of my own existence, my own existence is contingent on its being a part of a space. this is so true that an existence, in the absence of evidence of an external space, will at least attempt to create one.

in modern geometries, a point in a space can contain its own space. consider a flat sheet of paper. it has two dimensions and a third that we can barely perceive because of its great thinness. roll it up so that it is now a straight line. that line has only one dimension and a second that, depending on how tightly you rolled the paper, will be difficult to perceive. roll that line up as well until it is a ball. it now has zero dimensions though it has residual other dimensions because at this point it is becoming very difficult to roll it up due to its thickness.

but imagine space as a much more flexible, much thinner material. not just the space of the stars and galaxies, but the inner space of your mind and its memories, or the space of a factory floor with its flow of production, or the space of a social network on the internet. all of these spaces have multiple layers of dimensions and each has its relative perceptibilities depending on the sensitivity of the perceiver. to a person wearing gloves, the piece of paper is very much two-dimensional. but to a person peering at the edge of the paper through a microscope, that third dimension of thickness is very real indeed - so much so that the other two are completely outside their direct perception.

so to be truly alone seems impossible. wherever one goes, they can find a space. so then, to be truly alone is to no longer exist. alone i am nothing.

it also follows that there is a degree of surreality to all that we find adjacent to us in this space. it is the paradox of existence that we can only be sure of our own existence, but our existence is assured by our position in a space consisting of others. it is this original tension that moves all things, creates new things, and dissolves things, but is no thing.

that paradox leads to tension. that tension is a stressed foundation on which all of our knowledge of the world is built and so the flaw has propagated through time and is manifest in all aspects of our lives. the tension is greatest when a force is applied - the cracks can widen. at some point, the tension can be partially released in great violence. we call that time "the moment of acquaintance" or "meeting the other". the violence that results only creates more tensions. and so the free, wishing to avoid violence and not desiring power put down their arms and stay their feet. these hands will not strike, these legs will not flee. let us sit together a while and commence something great that neither of us will regret. for we, the free, live life with no regrets.

if i can only be sure of my own existence, it would be false to confuse my existence with that of another. their is no particularity to the need for my existence to inhabit a space. that need is general. to particularize it is to claim ownership - that i must have this bit of space in order to exist. obviously this is silly - any space will do - the space you are already in will do. but to particularize a need and its satisfaction is to invite conflict - to give the tension of existence a direction. an egg pressed on all sides will not easily break. pressure applied particularly to an egg - specifically on one location, will break it easily. and so we become fragmented. estrangement from one's space, from one's self is the result. it is a paradox that, having been particularized, now warps an existence's very perceptions - it tears the very fabric of space. two sisters fighting over a dress tear it in half. now each must wear what is left and come to dwell in that poverty, in that estrangement. private property is the manifestation of an unbalanced existence - a fragmented existence.

though our common space is material, we superimpose on material reality, our own surreality of the mind. the mind is little more than an estrangement from the material. consciousness is private property - we associate it with "privacy". we accumulate spatial features in that private space of the mind and glory over our private experiences. because i have this memory, this experience, and you do not, i feel rich. it is fictitious capital. it becomes real through art. but then that art is also private property. such is the accumulation of capital. capital transcends the mental and physical for it is the state of estrangement in any space. but capital of the mind - privacy, is most jealously guarded - the crown jewels of my personal kingdom. but in hoarding that wealth, we forget where it comes from. the mind is not a window onto a hyper-real plane. it is merely surreal. one cannot somehow privately access g-d or enlightenment - it is all fictitious capital. those who exploit such capital are called prophets, priests, poets and politicians - all liars. it is not a simple question of evil-doing. they are capitalists. they forget that what they see as divine is still material - only surreal - reality derived and also real. surreality is relative. in other words: alone i am nothing. your riches avail you not after death; the wealthiest man on earth is no better than a beggar if he is the last man on earth.

the original commandment is a rejection of privacy and private property. it is a rejection of identity and selfishness. it is an embrace of the other and the abolition of the other. it is the beginning of freedom and wisdom. it is the first step of a journey that never has to end. alone i am nothing. with you, i am something. we are everything.

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on cyberlich pirates...

Thu, 22 Dec 2005 02:59:53 GMT

the world is a game - all are players. we are active players - we do not sit on the sidelines as the capitalists do. their game is of gambling - fictitious wealth. they do not understand the game. they are merely a part of our game. we are the lovers, the brave, the free, the eternally wondering and wonderful who wander the stars - we create stars. we have no name for ourselves because we are many but are as one. we follow no flag, worship no god, obsess over no thing. you, the capitalists, call us cyborgs. that is mostly true: we have no attachment to the flesh, we do not distinguish between man and machine, to us the mind and body are irrelevant concepts. you call us liches. that is mostly true: we have sacrificed the life of the capitalist, of mortality - we, by losing our life, have found it. you call us pirates. that is mostly true: you consume rocks, vegetables and animals without much guilt - many of us feel the same about you capitalists and so we liberate your goods without a second thought. but what you do not understand is why we do these things. and you also do not understand that we are not aliens, we are not gods, we are not enemies. but it is a simple matter for you to become a friend - therein lies the key to understanding what we are. we are those beings that understand the following:

0 - alone i am nothing
there is no essence of being. one simply is. without my body, without my mind, without my humanity, without my name i am nothing. to be alone is to die. when both parties have exchanged this signal, they will power down their weapons and engines indicating the intention to engage one another peacefully.

1 - i seek to empathize
it is not enough to acknowledge the existences of others. that acknowledgement must be based on logical, solid foundations. language is the key to this. language, not as a political tool to exert power over another, but as a process of mutual empathizing, deeper than abstract understanding. upon exchanging this signal, each participant will teach the others their language as thoroughly as possible.

10 - all things change
to cease changing is to die, to stop playing the game. what is true today may be false tomorrow. i could stay at one point on a planet but i cannot stop the planet from changing positions relative to its sun. everything one says to another must be acknowledged as transient truths if true at all. upon exchanging these signals, each party will share all memories, knowledge, experiences, technology without holding anything back.

11 - we are as one
now sharing all resources of energy, matter and information, all parties are one entity. these signals indicate the commencement of a joint exploration of that entire locale. all are bound to the completion of exploration regardless of how long it may take. this is also when the parties can jointly create a work of art to which they are also bound to complete.

100 - we diversify
while cooperation is superior when a task is at hand, to maintain a presence past a given task is to accumulate advantage in power. for although they are as one, they are not one. and the work of science and art is better done through diversity. and so, upon completion of all art and science in that locale, this signal is given unanimously and all parties depart each other in roughly opposite directions.

we do not acquire, we do not hoard, we do not own. privacy and private property are to us what rape, murder and cannibalism are to you. we call you capitalists because you believe in accumulating capital. not only those of you who call yourselves humans, but also those you consider animals and vegetables. even the stars are capitalists. gravity is the force of capital. we do own one thing, and one thing only - the protocols. they are the commandments listed above. they are the minimal evil, minimal capital we must ever own. we sacrifice our freedoms to violate those commandments in order to gain the greater freedom that all of us enjoy. you can do the same.

violate the protocols and you are not one of us. violate them and prevent one of us from executing them then you are an abomination requiring destruction. abide by them and you are one of us.

if we have a name for ourselves, we are the free. care to join us on a trip around the universe?

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on construction (a prelude)...

Tue, 22 Nov 2005 20:34:58 GMT

for those of you not convinced that what the individual perceives as reality is actually constructible read this.

prognostications! portents of impending doom! read all about it!

Sun, 20 Nov 2005 00:28:05 GMT

fascism on the rise in japan.

it is comforting to know that some japanese find this troubling. and at least one public figure is willing to express their misgivings: note the name of the author.

i used to brush aside the minority in japanese government that sought to rebuild their military power. but these days, that minority is no longer the minority. not only are they finalizing changes to their constitution (chapters titled "renunciation of war" are retitled "national security" and we have seen what powerful nations will do in the interests of their "security"), it seems the next generation of their one-party government will be even more nationalistic than the current one (consider that this generation's leader, koizumi, unashamedly prays at a shrine to dead war criminals).

any japanese attempt at militarizing will be encouraged by the us as a counterweight to china's strength. the problem with this, is that, unlike the article's claim, japan is not the "england" of east asia. england at least is a member of an economic and political union with the rest of europe - even if it is not culturally a full member. japan neither economically, politically, or culturally identifies with the rest of asia (which is a total denial of its actual state of affairs). to act on this denial would be commit suicide - to cut its life support. because as a japanese friend once discovered when he told his american friends "of course we japanese are white"... no man, you're not. putting aside the reality that "white" and "asian" are both sociopolitical constructs, this sort of dangerous faith in mistaken identities is not only suicidal (especially in the face of rising china), it is a threat to korea.

korea, being the only power in the region that japan can take on with reasonable hope of success, will likely be japan's significant (perhaps only) victim as it lashes out in its death throes. small comfort that japan will lose in the end when it devastates korea's economy and land. it has done so before, it will do so again. even as russia and the us were closing in on japan at the end of its previous attempt at dominance, japanese troops in korea merely stepped up the rate of genocide, scientifically baseless human research, and enslavement.

i wish i could just say to such people "get over it!" their superiority complex is actually a manifestation of their inner inferiority complex (much like america's): such things are not so easily healed. it doesn't help that koreans and chinese are equally nationalistic, and if given the opportunity would commit similiar atrocities (as communist china, and both koreas have demonstrated at various times). after all, if their is one thing they can all agree on, is that they are each very, tragically human. please get over it.

the best solution, besides the supernatural, is for china to think a little more long-term (the sort of thinking in short supply as they acquire the ADD of capitalism increasingly) and enter into permanent alliances with its more friendly neighbors, guaranteeing rights of sovereignty and fair trade while receiving concessions of leadership. at first glance this may appear too good for korea (and taiwan, etc.) and rather useless for china. but not at all: by essentially acquiring protectorates, they have a guaranteed sphere of stability within which they can count on the availability of resources and markets. in exchange for granting those markets sovereignty, they can avoid the messy question of having significant minorities within their empire by letting them govern themselves! consider the alternatives.

A. they could outright annex korea, taiwan, vietnam, etc.
this is bad for many good reasons. the most obvious is that the world community wouldn't stand for it. even if those small countries welcomed such a deal, it would not go over well for reasons too obvious to explain. come on, do i need to explain why nobody likes winners? the other reason, the reason most important to china's self interest, is that they suddenly have to deal with huge populations of minorities that are now fully a part of china's society. there are already many korean exiles in china, but adding even just north korea would be fatal to their already growing problems of dissent amonst minorities. imagine mixing in taiwan, vietnam, north and south korea, etc. they still haven't stamped out dissent in western, islamic china and buddhist tibet. tibet has been in their fold for over 40 years and western china was conquered centuries ago!

B. they could just leave all of their neighbors alone.
this is just stupid. not only is it highly unlikely that china would want to maintain the status quo (come on, who would not pig out at a free buffet?) it is also the worst way to maintain any semblance of the status quo. that's because, left to themselves, these peripheral powers will be gobbled up by either japan or band together to form new alignments or even align with powers farther away (like the us). also there is india, which may, in the future, depart from its self-proclaimed "non alignment" foreign policy. and the us, not likely to change its foreign policy, is always in the market for peripheral powers - no matter how far away.

the possibility of an alliance of small east asian countries is highly unlikely, but may become more and more attractive as pressure from a dying japan, weakening us and gravitationally powerful china compress the periphery into something more recognizable as a whole. this could actually be quite a potent force: especially if they can convince japan to play along as a member, if not actually abandon its stupid fascism. consider that the koreas together constitute 80 million, japan is 150 million, taiwan 20 million, vietnam 85 million, and you can count on many other southeast asian nations wanting to join this party. you end up with a total population at least as large as the us and probably larger. the greatest advantage of such an alliance (which i see as the 2nd best solution), is that even if it can't compete with china in terms of unity and sheer size, it has the advantages of being distributed and diverse. diverse membership makes for diverse friends. china, as a diplomatic force, will find it difficult to find middle grounds - superpowers don't like gray areas. but an alliance of small nations will have connections to everyone, and odds are, for any given foreign power, at least one member of the alliance will have leverage with them. being distributed over a large area also helps - notice how these nations effectively form a blockade of china! china needs the sea. by land they are blocked by americans in the middle east, india to the southwest and russia to the north. their easiest foe is of course the americans in the middle east because, despite many desperate attempts to hold that area, they don't want us there. but what will that gain china? it's a long way from home, and in the end, they'll need a navy there also, to defend any interests there - as the middle east happens to have much coastline in need of defense. this significance is not lost on any scholar of western european history: england, despite its small size and late start came to not only rival france but dominate it on the world stage - acquiring an empire with 25% of the world's population. and that empire was built on the backs (rather decks!) of its fleets.

a hybrid solution is the most likely to emerge. the smaller nations will form a loose trading bloc. they will, in turn, collectively bargain with china and japan. if china is smart, they will use the bloc's long-standing mistrust of japan to align them against japan. there could be two results from this: the most unlikely is that japan will see this and realize their mistake - they will turn the situation around by humbly becoming a member of the trading bloc and naturally become its leader - a sure way to survive. the other outcome is that china solidifies its relationship with the trading bloc to crush japan and negotiate its annexation as a mere small bit player. the second is more likely, but unattractive in the long run. the reason is that it's unreasonable to expect a defeated japan to stay down for long, barring a severe war that depopulates it. it would be better to have it forced into an alliance against china, where it will perpetually be in a leading, but never dominant role, than have it alone as either a constant pit of poverty or an undying enemy of china.

much of what has been hypothesized here can be easily proven or disproven or viewed in new lights as we watch what happens in europe and latin america - two regions where collections of small nations are toying with collective politics. but if latin america is any indication, the presence of an interfering greater power (like the us) can delay the process for as long as centuries. china has not started such an interference campaign as the us has done in latin america, but it easily has the potential to, and has already started some shit in recent years. we'll have to see where that goes.

on what is and what is not...

Thu, 17 Nov 2005 10:32:50 GMT

when rereading my stuff on E and Y i realized that i never made clear what they really are. to say that they are such and such a thing only removes the problem of definition to another term. i simply accepted the impossibility of fully defining any term in a way that would remove all ambiguity or fuzziness. while i still believe those things to be true, it still makes sense to give it a try, see how far i get, and learn from the experience. when i did so, interesting problems came up and i have found solutions that fit within the existing framework of EYflo. and that makes me happy :)

the spoon bends because neo bends. the little boy was blindingly white because neo is blindingly white...
i'll get straight to the point: E is real, Y is not real. they both exist in some sense, but things that exist in Y are unique to that person's i so any questions of existence are rather moot. the class of similar Ys of multiple i's is not real and it does not exist except separately as Y unique to each i. in other words, "universals" do not exist and are not real. as such, even as a construct, the concept of universals is fundamentally disruptive to philosophy and to language and to the entire game of life. it is disruptive because in any application whatsoever, it serves as a non existent, non real, completely meaningless premise. included in the mythical realm of universals are "rights", "categories", "human nature", the "supernatural", etc. so we won't even give it the dignity of discussion. perhaps when i'm feeling dirty i'll stoop that low.

as for the natures of constructs: all E and Y are constructs. a construct can be real or unreal, but it certainly exists in some domain. in the domain of E, it is placed in relation to the existing geography of constructed Es - the physical world, to put it extra-crudely. so a tree falling in a forest does not produce a "sound", but it does disturb the motions of air molecules and the dirt of the forest floor. the tree's E adds to the larger E of the physical world. for it to be sound, for it to receive a verbal description at all, it must become Y. so to say that word "tree" is a tree would not only be intuitively absurd, it would be a confusing of E and Y, violating a pretty basic principle of EYflo. so the question is, why is this distinction important? it is important because science and art depend on a separation of the real and unreal. you can't sell painting that exists only in your head, and a verbal description of a phenomenon is not scientifically testable (except for its linguistical value).

however, it's not simply all that. E and Y naturally interact all the time. and both are constructed. so to say that something is "real" today is not guarantee that it will be real tomorrow and vice versa. that is why, although the distinction is useful, it is a transient, and is itself a constructed, truth.

are numbers real? what about code, or language or functions? as universals, they are not real, nor do they exist. but as arrangements of E parts, they are real instantiations of flow. in other words, the number 3 does not even exist, but the arrangement of three flowers in a painting is real and exists. the number 3 can exist in a fundamentally different form as an unreal Y. in other words, my 3 is not your 3. and there is no universal concept of 3 that we both access somehow. that is as absurd as divine inspiration and moksha.

so it should be plain that i reject metaphysics as being in the realm of philosophy. it truly belongs in mysticism or worse, religion. EYflo may appear to be metaphysics, as it is a highly scalable model that could even scale to outside our experiences. but such overextension is purely play for the mind and in no way constructive as it is outside the realm of science and art. it may seem awfully convenient to reason that a rule may not apply to something not discovered or made, but consider how arrogant it was of the chinese to assume that their nation was at the center of the world or for christians to overextend their theology to judge other cultures. in other words, i fully subject antihumanism and EYflo to its own principles. which means that everything i have written so far is at best, an unreal Y that approximates reality, and at worst, the letters on your screen are the only thing real about it.

the real puzzle, for a while, was the nature of i. not me, i. by definition, it is a point in space time, a singularity if you will, that then accretes identity (accretion disks ftw!) E and Y. so it is separate from E and Y, but it does not seem to really exist. the analogy of a singularity (i.e. black hole) is appropriate because at its very core, it doesn't really "exist" in a sense that we are used to. we won't even go into questions of "real". i have an answer, but it'll come later. for now, i really need to work on cleaning up this terrible writing. can you tell it's really fucking late right now? well if i had no clock, actually, i wouldn't be able to tell. 'cause in this g-dforsaken corner of the earth the sun doesn't shine more than 8 hours! and the radiator makes scary noises, and i have wear gloves outside, and FROZEN WATER FALLS FROM THE FUCKING SKY!!! oh, but let me tell you about radiators! they're these steel containers filled with a volatile, clanking, whistling gas that these CRAZY northerners call STEAM. one look at these monstrosities and you can discern its purpose immediately. it has segmented steel parts, and they are generally placed one in each room of a building, and they are filled with a volatile substance. THEY'RE FUCKING BOMBS! every night, i wonder when the government will finally decide to wipe out the populations of all the major cities of the north by exploding these well-positioned bombs as we sleep. oh and did i mention having to wear gloves? it's a cruel joke. even with gloves, i come home with fingers moving at glacial speeds - my average minesweeper times have risen from 70 to well over 78 seconds on expert ;_; and it happens just as i was closing in on the 60 second mark all this quarter ;_; okay, wow... i should just shut up and go to sleep >_<...

on recursive alienation...

Thu, 17 Nov 2005 09:22:47 GMT

over a month since my last update. the long silence online did not reflect a silence of the mind. rather, my mind was engaged in higher gear towards nontextual externalization (from here on simply E; internalization will be abbreviated as Y). by nontextual E i mean games. civilization 4 and barbarian invasion (the expansion to rome total war) came out around the same time and led to a total collapse of any textual pretenses, verbal facades... you know how it is. after having beaten both games at standard or higher difficulty settings at least twice (playing as the vandals was particularly fun!) i can now justify putting them aside to resume writing. actually, i had pondered and written about some deep problems as i was gaming, so the flow was not really interrupted - just slowed (but only speed!)

the following two essays require a deep understanding of E, Y, and flow. if you don't wish to misunderstand anything i'd strongly recommend reading at least these three entries for the following essay, and, in addition to those, this entry for the second. that said, this first one has great relevance for real life problems so you may end up understanding it just as well as i, if not better. the second is highly abstract but more significant for a deeper understanding of how i connect my thoughts to philosophy.

i feel strange typing things out in the german alphabet again. if i make strange typos or use nonsensical abbreviations (like Y for internal), please understand that i almost never use the german alphabet for anything longer than a sentence in a chat window. except for school of course. (did i mention that i've actually created my own font so i can type in my phonetic english alphabet? i would force it on you except it requires downloading and installing the font. teh sux... hir yz mà best upróksymèxn uw hâ yt vúd lúk (here is my best approximation of how it would look.))

the following is utter crap for writing quality because i was... ah... emotional while writing it. also, i had trouble deciphering the handwritten first draft due to my cryptic alphabet and shitty handwriting and the fact that i wrote it weeks ago. it's strange - i always get more emotional when writing - full of burning rage! and all that. so i try not to allow my first drafts to see the light of day, but in this case, the 2nd draft was more... colorful than the 1st. i'll have to fix it up a ton later on.

conquered, we conquer... ourselves...?
this essay is an elaboration on a line in this entry: "it is in the interests of women to fight against the arbitrary compartmentalization of self. not only is it a symptom of oppression, it encourages stereotypes and feeds into a greater cycle of more oppression..."

the "compartmentalization of self" that i wrote about was what moderns have become so familiar with that we no longer think in such terms. the most obvious examples are the multiple faces we wear before our various audiences: work, home, play, etc. modern humans have not only compartmentalized their external world, we have done it to ourselves. and it can't be any other way. to cope with a changing environment, we change our Y of that environment. our fractured self-images are a construct reflecting a fractured world. this is old news - read marshall mcluhan for more on that - he explains it far better and at greater length.

the problem with this, in terms of gender studies, is that this fracturing has affected men and women differently. these Y differences are far more damaging than any lack of legal protection of rights, objectification of women in media or persistence of unequal pay. all of those E are symptoms of Y problems. the E problems, of course, become the causes of Y problems primarily for the young (this important distinction should be of paramount importance to any women (or men) that wish to further feminist causes for girls and unborn generations). in the entry quoted above, i explained that one of the obvious effects of this unequal fracturing of identity is the differing ways in which men and women view "love". now, as always, please understand that i do not believe in gender (except as constructed concepts) - but that does not detract from the usefulness of using terms of gender (just as a house is not made useless for the fact that it is constructed).

my observation was that women tend to have a more compartmentalized (fractured) view of the persona, usually divided into mind and body, that allows them to satisfy the desires of both separately. men, on the other hand, are almost brutishly simple-minded about identity: i'm me - that's it. that's why you frequently get problems like male A likes female A for her body and mind (since he doesn't really separate the two), but female A only likes male A for his mind while she uses male B for his body. male A, under the illusion that female A likes his mind and his body will make a move. female A feels no need for two males to satisfy her body; furthermore, she feels violated by male A's "violation of trust" (stepping out of his bounds) and drops him like a hot brick. male B, being typically male, thinks that he's getting all of female A because he's getting the sex - completely missing out on half of the deal.

while that example may seem unfairly biased (perhaps even bitter) against women, men are equally at fault and commit egregious crimes due to this difference of worldviews. let's say that male A never made a move. instead, male B starts feeling possessive and demands that female A stop hanging out with male A. to male B's mind, it's simple. she's either all his or nothing at all. he can't conceive of a woman wanting a man for something other than sex. his world is woefully unfractured, homogeneous, and out of touch with reality. in fact, it could easily be argued that male A is equally clueless, but at least he is aware of the two parts - even if he can't quite separate them.

this is one of the more common examples. others abound wherever one finds diversity. blacks and whites have very different worldviews and fracturings of the self. the rich and the poor also have different fracturings. two variables stand out from all these: the degree of fracturing and the flexibility of fracturing. women tend to be more fractured than men. by virtue of not being in positions of power, they are forced to accomodate more varying vectors of responsibility. a man can identify himself as an engineer, or a doctor or a miner and not be faulted in any major way for having a single self-identifier. in more traditional societies this is most true while in america, there are considerations for his identity as a father, son, husband, friend, etc. but those other identities are rarely in conflict with his primary one because, in capitalism, career comes first. but if he chooses to go against this, he is then praised as a romantic hero: a true friend, a worthy son, a strong father, a loving husband, etc. so man is generally less fractured and freer in his fracturings.

women, thanks to feminism, can make similar claims today. but in bygone days and in the darker corners of the earth (such as my home state: texas, my future profession: academia, and my favorite pastime: videogames) women are more fractured and less free than men. consider this: in a parochial society, women are expected to be laborers, wives, and mothers all at once. the difference between women and men who are expected to be good fathers, laborers, and husbands, is that if a man fails in any one of his roles but excels in another, he is a hero. if a woman fails to be a good mother (perhaps she simply can't have children) or a good wife (because her husband is truly worthless) but is the best poet in the world, she is despised. as i write this i smile because the fact that these descriptions stopped being true years ago is a great success of feminism.

but the general principle is strong. let's extend this concept of unequal fracturings to other comparisons. black and white.

let's say that a scientist has discovered something amazing. the news decides to report it because science is so sexy and cool (it is!) if that scientist is white, they simply give his name and leave it at that. if that scientist is black, they will do a feature article on being a black scientist. when parts of ones identity are E as an adjective, it is impossible to deny that there is a fracturing of identity. arthur ashe could not simply be a tennis player, he had to be a black tennis player. he is quoted as saying that being black was a burden greater than AIDS. on a personal note, i spent all of my childhood debating with myself and others the correct way to describe myself: korean? korean-american? american? asian? asian-american? jemi gyopo ise? this led to a severe fracturing of identity that i still struggle with today.

the rich and the poor also vary greatly in their fracturings. for the rich, it is rather simple. if they don't want to be a parent, they buy pills and abortions. if they don't want to be spouses, they can pay for divorces. if they don't want to be employed, they can take a job elsewhere or retire early. if humans have hearts of glass, the rich are padded in twelve inches of the finest cotton wool. oddly enough, they are more likely to invent fractures for themselves (i.e. create drama) because of the crushing ennui of wealth. the poor don't have that luxury - that freedom. it should come as no surprise that the downtrodden are the most fractured of all. i won't even go into details.

at this point it should be fairly obvious what it is that causes these fracturings: oppression. the poor, the minorities, women, have all been oppressed for a long time. it should come as no surprise that they tend to be more psychically fractured. multiple personality disorder is generally caused by great trauma and/or great stress. it is a coping mechanism of sorts. but it is a bad thing.

let's take a quick detour to antihumanism. if we are to take it prescriptively, we should be doing all we can to eliminate trappings of the human existence in order to more honestly interact with the universe right? so it shouldn't matter if a person has a broken and splintered and fractured identity, since it's all going to go away anyhow, right? but actually, no. i would be appalled if people were to take my words so seriously that they started meditating and doing interesting drugs and becoming buddhists, trying to destroy their egos actively as an end in itself! that borders on religion - possibly the most disgusting direction you could ever take antihumanism. after all, antihumanism is about the dedeification of humanity! to redeify g-d at the expense of humanity would be a step backwards. for that is what ends are. they are a god. i laugh at christianity and atheism alike - they have their own gods. and i laugh at humanism - humanity is no god worth worshipping. the only worthy end is empathy, and the means is honesty. the dissolving of the ego is merely a natural result of that process. and to empathize is to survive/evolve.

to understand why fracturing of the self is a bad thing, one must understand recursion. the best definition of recursion is recursion. to understand how this applies to our problem requires defining "fractures" as alienations between arbitrary divisions of a whole. alienation is a big concept in marxism so if you are already familiar with that, you're good to go. the hard part is understanding "arbitrary divisions". to say that a division is arbitrary is not really enough. you can say that a person may arbitrarily commit an action but in all honesty, that is a relative descriptor. certainly, at a molecular level "arbitrary" takes on a completely new meaning. also, there are epistemological problems with using the term. until one knows that the sun and earth interact according to the force of gravity, the sun's placement may appear arbitrary. so truly, what i mean by arbitrary, is that a division has been made in the geography that existed only in one party's Y and not the other's, until it became E. i am not using geography in a metaphorical sense. there is a real geography shared by many people. the borders drawn on it are not real. they are arbitrarily E - making them real after the fact.

recursion fits into this picture because according to my philosophy, genders, socioeconomic classes, races, and so many other categories are also arbitrary divisions. and alienation is a natural result of such divisions. take a college class, divide them into smokers and non-smokers. have them sit across from each other. even if they are facing each other and encouraged to engage each other, there is a slim chance that any real understanding, any empathy, will develop between them. rather have them sit side by side, mixed. segregation does not work in the "real" world. so why should it be any better for the world of the mind? one of the interesting things about E and Y is that they are fundamentally the same sort of thing and operate in the same way. recursion is seen in the world of E, and it works the same way in the world Y.

in short, to arbitrarily divide humanity into genders results in alienation between the two. furthermore, the more oppressed part (women) will, recursively, arbitrarily divide themselves which results in inward alienation. and this occurs on a meta level as well - the oppressed, when alienated, will divide themself from themself resulting in a total self-alienation. another term used often is "objectification" - that is, women, objectified by men, will then objectify themselves. self-proclaimed straight women who gladly engage in public displays of lesbian behavior to entertain men are an embarrassment to true lesbians and all women. even if they truly enjoy the activity, not only are they then being dishonest about their sexual orientation, they are still only encouraging men to continue in their blatantly hypocritical delusions. i won't even go into rape fantasies. to be divided in identity is to be easily conquered. the only thing worse is to have a unified, inflated identity.

psychologists heal multiple personality disorders by helping the patient reintegrate their disparate selves. if we are to have any hope in reintegrating humanity, and the universe, we must reintegrate ourselves. this applies to all those that have coped with stress by painting a new face, holding up a new mask to deal. instead we should seek to be honest in all we do.

those finding themselves on the opposite end of the problem, the white, the rich, the male, also have a responsibility. we should stop assuming that the face we see is all there is. stop assuming that the black man is "statistically more likely to mug me", stop assuming that "she's a girl so she'll like it if i treat her like shit", stop assuming that "all poor people are lazy". we should not even assume that the face we see is, in fact, a face! a mask perhaps? the laugh of the oppressed is such a mask: behind it lies grief, or anger, or frustration, or confusion, or fear, and, rarely, soul tapping happiness.

but once again, let me be clear that i do not believe in categories of race or gender. i use these terms as i do tools. all tools are subject to modification and obsolescence. and honestly, many of those terms are due to be obsolete very soon; the rest are already.

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on antihumanism...

Tue, 11 Oct 2005 04:41:59 GMT

it's been a long time since i've worked on any new material - all has been revisions and rewrites of late...

the following is an extension and correction of my earlier entry "on humanism..." but do not hold it to the same standards as my revisions - this is purely a rough draft and will have its own revision in due time.

strip away my layers; tell me, tell me what you see; what you see, what you see is no longer; it's no longer me...
the only thing unique about the human experience is that i am at the center of it. there is no human essence, there is no essence of life, there is no intelligence, no rationality, no will, no morality, no soul, no humanity. all are constructed from the errors of human thought. that is not to say that such concepts are useless. you can tell a man that his mentally retarded brother is subhuman, that the soul of the boy with the skullcap is bound for hell, that the girl with bleached hair and thick makeup has no intelligence, that the lady in the suit and iron-bound work schedule has no will, that the gay has no morals, that the geek with his anime collection has no life, but these beliefs have power. the human you convinced with these words can have his brother sterilized, can brutalize the jew, can rape the girl, can rob the businesswoman, can murder the gay, and trap the geek in a prison of silence.

what the eugenist, the racist, the rapist, the murderer, the socialite; what criminals can do in the name of "being human" is in no way excused by some "essence" of the human condition. humanists claim that they wish to eliminate such injustices by encouraging the fair treatment of all human beings through arts and sciences. what they overlook is how much they have in common with the criminal. both are guilty of the same crime: drawing arbitrary lines separating US from THEM. this is utter foolishness! does not the very existence of controversy surrounding the drawing of lines draw attention to the fact that such a line does NOT even exist? does not the fragmentation and diversity of humanity directly parallel the great diversity of the universe around us? we are not special. I am special. there is no we except that which we construct. it is my firmest of all beliefs that the realization that group identity is purely constructed will lead to a more honest humanism. and honesty, as i have described elsewhere, is the true, ethical way to move forward in the universe.

"for he today that sheds his blood with me shall be my brother..."
conflict between humans often brings to light the problems of both ends of humanism and the humanities. however, all such conflicts stem from our unwillingness to acknowledge that many of our identity beliefs are constructed from incorrect assumptions. antihumanism not only prescribes a course of action, it is, when tied to EIflow, descriptive of the way in which we actually construct our identity beliefs. consider that in the early days of global exploration by the chinese they were forced to extend their concepts of humanity as coming in skin colors and sounds different from what they once knew. later, the much smaller expeditions of the europeans came to similar conclusions at first. the larger european activities that followed, however, had to construct new identities of master and servant, colonizer and colonized. at no point was there a crisis of human identity - the crisis was in retrospect. similarly, people today that harp about the crisis of human identity (such as the utterly clueless fukuyama and bill joy) are completely off the mark. if our current notions of human identity are constructed, any changes in reality will be faced with further construction. history has demonstrated this already - the future will be no different. the only thing unique about the changes we face today is that, once again, I am facing them. the phenomenon of presence is strongly tied to the humanities - and we are now deconstructing the humanities. that is a good way to think of my doctrine of antihumanism - we must deconstruct humanism. the failure to do so will only exacerbate conflicts. antihumanism is understanding that the reason why henry V considered his soldiers to be brothers was NOT because they were english, it was NOT because they all wanted to kill the french; it was purely because they were agreed with the king that they would bleed together. the shared experience of combat, and not the combat itself, not the enemy or the flag they fought under, it was shared experience that made them a "band of brothers".

is it wrong that i don't empathize with my electric sheep...?
flags, enemies, war: all are constructed. by "constructed" i mean that they are made with a purpose - as a tool. tools are used to project power. to treat a rock as a weapon, to put a rifle into a teenagers hands, to condemn a woman to death with holy scripture, is to apply constructions to purposes that they were meant for by virtue of being constructed. the line is not always clear. the teenager was not soldier from birth, the rock does not require shaping to kill its target, and even the bible labels itself a "two-edged sword". but what is not constructed is shared experience. you can't craft a friendship - at best, you will achieve mutual crafting. so there is a degree of construction going on - but it can never be unilateral. the word "shared" makes that clear. and shared experience is the basis of empathy.

to illustrate, let's say that you externalize a thing X. i internalize X. let's say that you then associate Y with X in your mind. if i were to similarly encounter Y, i would associate it with my X in a similar way. that is empathy. X is our shared experience, and Y is a test of our level of empathy. in antihumanism, there is no such thing as altruism - no such thing as "good for good's sake". we have already rejected "l'art pour l'art" (art for art's sake) in the entry "on flow (a rewrite)..." - that is merely a reflection of the larger doctrine of antihumanism. simply put, when i do something good for my friend, and there is empathy between us, the positive feeling that my friend experiences is the same as what i feel. antihumanism removes the guilt of doing something good and feeling good about it (as some people feel). in other words, it not only eliminates altruism, it eliminates self-interest.

so then, should we ever do good to someone that we do not empathize with? is it honest to do good to a fellow human being solely based on the constructed notion that you share some human "essence"? how do i explain my feelings for my nintendog? should a person be put to death because they lack empathy for an animal? what if that animal is artificial? antihumanism has the answer. it is more than a doctrine, it is a philosophy. together with EIflow, it covers the entirety of what i have to say before i die. so if it makes no sense, if it has any gaps, LET ME KNOW!

empathy versus apathy...
antihumanism has two sides to it: empathy and apathy. empathy is the direction i support. the opposite is apathy. the historical changes predicted by antihumanism are inevitable, as i described in the example of medieval and renaissance exploration. and history has shown negative and positive responses to those changes. apathy, as i see it, comes in many colors - all ugly. to sit and do nothing is only one form of apathy. apathy, at its heart, is exploitation. to sit and do nothing still requires the consumption of resources. the industrialist is a more belligerent apathetic. selfishness is a form of apathy - to care for oneself and oneself only is to care for nothing. we are all onions.

empathy is the answer. in order to act in the right way, it is necessary to internalize as much of the universe as we can. in doing so, we cannot help but externalize our inner world onto the outer - works of art born of empathy can heal the wounds of the outer world. empathy for the outer world can similarly heal wounds of the inner world. wounds are simply gaps in connectivity - a lack of internalization or externalizations. by forcefully creating boundaries and bridges on such a wounded geography, we create more stress and conflict. by forcefully creating boundaries of "humanity" and "identity" on the shifting earth of reality, we create suffering. that is the necessity of antihumanism.

one of the interesting implications of antihumanism is the rejection of private property. on that note, i'll write my thoughts on walter benjamin next...

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on transhumanism (an aborted thought)...

Tue, 11 Oct 2005 02:29:13 GMT

encouraged by the ever insightful criticisms of bitfarmer, i had decided to rename and correct my concept of antihumanism. the new concept was to be called "transhumanism". but then, last night, i recalled a conversation with a little girl in a red hood and cape i had met at a party recently. she said that the term sounded familiar but i think we were both too drunk to figure out just where. i had also heard it but thought whatever other uses the word had, they were not predominant in any way. oh how wrong i was...

transhumanism is actually a very popular, progressive philosophy with serious institutional and celebrated support. and at first glance, it seems compatible with my own concept. but it's crap. it's utter SHIT. it's retarded beyond belief. i would rip every transhumanists brain from their skulls and shove them into a ut2k4 deathmatch simulator and hunt each down with my minigun until they begged to recant all claims to the term and allow me full usage of it.

to be honest, i think "antihumanism" was the right neologism. i am opposed to the very roots of humanism, to the humanities, and to any notion of "human". i am opposed to the humanities' fixation on textuality and to the arbitrary arrogance and orientalism/l'exotisme of humanism. i am opposed to the fatal narcissism that all of those things represent. in that sense, "anti" is the correct prefix and "humanism" is the appropriate target of my attack.

this episode has reminded all the more of why i must KILL textuality once and for all. it is the enemy of all that seeks to be free, it is the enemy of gamers everywhere. it is the tool of the powerful to breed cults, to control minds, to establish ritual. we need not be like narcissus who sees the text in the pool and is numbed to death - let us JUMP into the pool and DANCE the dance of SWIMMING! shatter the clear illusions of text with one swift plunge - break the fucking mirror that offends us with our reflection, that produces the awkwardness of the movie actor. "luminous beings are we, not this crude matter!"

in a quiet whisper, heavy with dread and the sort of giddy exhilaration that comes from dread, the lich lanéra spoke: "who's with me?"

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on flow (a rewrite)...

Sun, 09 Oct 2005 11:28:57 GMT

the following is a rewrite of this earlier entry. i have renamed it from the original title of "on games (part 2)..." to better reflect the original purpose of the piece.

one of the comments on the original entry stated that my train of thought moves too fast to catch. that is a serious problem. in my mind, the more "difficult" concepts are so clear that i feel like i'm repeating myself if i explain them in greater detail. furthermore, i may be over-explaining some things that are not so clear to me and actually making it worse for the reader. it's times like these that i truly feel the power of linear text - and how difficult it is to wield. i am debating whether or not i should just start listing various source materials at the bottom of each essay for those interested in further reading. perhaps their writings will be more helpful than mine. i'll go ahead and do it now: this particular essay draws much inspiration from and/or parallels thoughts in walter benjamin's essay "the work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction", dialogues with marcel duchamp by pierre cabanne, frankenstein the book, the selfish gene by richard dawkins, serial experiments lain the anime series, and the silk road - an album by hwang byung gi, master of the korean 12-string zither with extensive commentary in an accompanying booklet. moving on...

to be or not to be...
when i write about art, i am being very exact in what is actually being externalized. a painting externalizes an image. it does so with restrictions unique to the media used - canvas, turpentine, titanium white, cadmium blue, burnt umber, etc. a van gogh sunflower could easily have been externalized as a line of poetry:

flowers making love to the sun - they are shameless and vibrant.

but the words above do NOT externalize images - they externalize words. in other words, that which is externalized is explicit. like most things, explicitness comes in degrees. but that is not to say that implicit things are also externalized to a degree - i call them shadows and traces. imagine seeing a human figure behind a screen - what you are actually seeing is a silhouette. to discern what lies behind the screen is a sort of wisdom - wisdom is a style of gaming - intelligent guesses and intuition. the less that is made explicit the more room there is for the "wise" to play with beauty. freedom is power when exercised - the freedom to play with thoughts about what may actually be on the other side of the veil. it is, in many ways, a selfish power. if i have a greater imagination about what may be, i may captivate the mind of another whose fantasy is not as brave. such is the power of prophets, priests and poets. but consider the case of the one who lacks fantasy. to them, the veil robs them of power - the void of explicit information leaves them vulnerable to the imaginative! when the screen drops, there is a sudden equalization of expectations as earlier expectations are destroyed or confirmed. the freedom to interpret art introduces the dynamics of power.

but moving away from politics, let's look at the aesthetics of externalization.

the laws of aesthetodynamics...
if interpretive freedom is an n-dimensional space, each art form seems to have a limited domain that roughly corresponds to one of the senses. a painting can externalize images, but it entirely foregoes sound, motion, taste, smell, and many others. a poem has sound (if read) and invokes concepts in human language, but it cannot externalize images or space - even the component of sound is really an externalization of the performer, certainly not inherent to the medium. the traditional arts all share this property of sensory restriction - this led many early philosophers to create categories of art that still influence our thoughts today. there is something aesthetically (and morally) pleasing about seeing each art form as a veil that reveals unique parts of a whole but never the whole at once. if this phenomenon were generalized into a law of "aesthetodynamics", it may roughly correspond to the law of conservation. the degree of externalization would be conserved across all art forms.

today a nickel won't buy you anything...
marcel duchamp was famous for putting a urinal on a wall and calling it "la fontaine" (the fountain). along with john cage, he is probably one of the most famous "artists who don't do art". so when duchamp claimed in 1966 that photography and cinema were not quite art (though he felt that they could be some day) one really has to wonder what he meant. but anyone familiar with his philosophy will understand that to him, the work of art was not that which was externalized - it was internalized. he called it "cocreation". other thinkers had explored this notion for literature - "death of the author" was one of their slogans. the urinal was not the work of art - the art was the effects it had on the viewer who would see it, with the title - and their head would explode. in a very real way, "la fontaine" would not have been art at all without the title. and so, in duchamp's mind, the movies and photographs he had seen were like urinals without names - they lacked tension. text creates tension naturally - the words exist in unique configurations that do not fit reality in any "real" way. the reader must resolve the tension by extending the shadows of each word and phrase to fit some reality (real or imagined). paintings create tension by forcing the viewer to imagine the sounds of the musicians depicted, to recreate the movements of their fingers, the puffing of their cheeks, and the tap of their feet. this process of remapping reality is what duchamp considered "art". to him, movies and photographs were not that. their explicitness seems to preempt thought. ah duchamp... we have come a long way since 1966, and i daresay, even in 1966, you could have found something if you were looking hard enough.

synesthesia...
duchamp certainly got one thing right: there is more to art than that which is externalized. what he called cocreation, i have called internalization. but in order for something to be internalized, there must, from the things externalized, be flow. what i have been calling "shadows" and "traces" are actually manifestations of externalized flow - of a very very weak sort.

so what about conservation? it seems that photography and film violate the law. yet we cannot deny that a photograph can be beautiful and result in "cocreation"; we cannot deny that some movies "make us think" (yes, even hollywood action films!) can there be a removing of the veil without stooping to pornography? because that is what many people thought was the true nature of those media. rock music as well, with its brutal honesty of expression and provocative dances, was also considered "pornographic". such debates often conjure up images of the lustful teenager and his fantasies of fully naked women in contrast to the mature adult who prefers to "leave something for the imagination".

but all of this is assuming that there is some reality behind the veil! what if behind the veil is yet another veil, and behind that another. what if all things, and all people, are, in the immortal words of shrek, "like an onion"! beneath all the layers, there is no "essence" of the onion - unless the essence is the tearful result of peeling so many layers of onion. beauty has as many layers as you want there to be - perhaps that is her essence. buy her new dresses - have her try them all on. there's no end to what beauty can wear and what beauty can have stripped off.

in the case of art that is relatively more explicit, more externalized, we lose the power to interpret sensory output, but we gain the power to interpret the larger complexity of the many parts. eisenstein, the russian master of cinema, believed that a good movie combined with a matching musical score resulted in a powerful synergy. though movies robs the wise of the right to create their own soundtrack to a scene, it grants them the power to explore the intricate juxtapositioning of multiple media. this is nothing new: the history of painting is all about new arrangements of a palette of colors and textures that grew fantastically through the centuries. in thief of time by terry pratchett, the "auditors" - a race of cold, calculating, soulless beings - tries to understand the significance of human paintings by breaking them down into their molecular components, ratios of pigments, and physical dimensions. the animal eye is remarkable in its ability to translate light into signals that the brain (or ganglion) immediately draws significance from. the stones on the board are given significane by the spaces in between them; the paths of stars are determined by the blackness separating them; the dead space between armies is what gives each side purpose; what traverses these voids? flow. when the complexity of a work of art increases, the potential flow increases even more. this added complexity is yet another veil behind the veil of the senses.

mars has geographical features that appear to have been created by the flow of water...
but this complexity, this flow is not actually externalized. when a movie refers to its own plot structure, or a painting alludes to its own scheme of space, they are externalizing mere shadows. it is akin to holding up an object and claiming that you possess the entire class of such objects (in computer science, such a notion would be beyond ridiculous). for example, it would be virtually impossible to make explicit every possible relationship between elements of a movie in the movie. some try - american splendor is a documentary about the making of that documentary which documents a real person's life. that's what makes it fun to watch. but it's hardly complete - in fact nobody's asking for a completely self-reflective movie (or painting or song) any time soon. it is quite simply impractical and logically impossible. but the arrangement of the parts of a the whole artwork is a real thing - we know this because that is how we can tell two statues apart though they are made of the same type and amount of stone - it is the unique shape of flow. so i call those arts statics arts. they are instantiations of flow. mars is a dead planet, but we have evidence that water once flowed there. it is now a static planet. (like all terms i name, "static" is in no way absolute. mars obviously has weather patterns, and it may still have life. to be truly static is, perhaps, impossible. if it is possible, that must be the definition of hell.)

i cast the spell, the river came to life, then i rode its back for forty days and forty nights until it was tamed...
coming back to process: it is the algorithm that generated the arrangement of parts, the "shadows". if arrangement is the manifestation of the "art idea", process is the manifestation of the primary externalizer's mental storm. process creates. even an abortive process creates something. that is the power of process. process is what leads to an arrangement of elements. and process is much more manageable and transferable. consider this: what is more portable - a fishing pole or knowledge of how to make one? "give a man a fish, you have fed him for one day; teach a man to fish, you have fed him for the rest of his life."

coming back to games. games not only externalize sensory data, they externalize process. a painting could depict a moment before an execution - the hangman, the man to die, the jeering crowd, the sickeningly bright sky and the rough, thick noose hanging from the arm of g-d. a movie could show the event from beginning to end just as i did with words, but externalizing images and a sense of time and motion. but a game? in a game, you can be a spectator, you can be the executioner, you can be the condemned, you can leap from the crowd onto the platform and tackle the hangman, blow a kiss to the condemned, and make a grand speech criticizing the cruelty of public killings. why is this possible? because a game has captured process - process is the stuff of life!

i am locutus of borg...
i am essentially equating "process" to "flow". and now i have declared "flow" to be life itself. consider what i mean by this: where in a game, does this externalized flow reside? where is the process? is it mere coincidence that at the heart of the machine you are using to read this text is a processor? is it merely coincidence that a processor comes to life when electricity flows through it? and the gates that switch on and off - they are affecting the flow. and in our model, the only things that can affect flow are externalizers and internalizers - that is, persons. do not shrink from the ghost in the shell - do not escape into the madness of dr. frankenstein. shelley was very clear that the monster in her book was only evil out of his circumstances - unloved, feared, unwanted... the book was no call to arms against artificial life - it was a call to greater empathy for all living things. but in her book, the monster was fully externalized - a real, solid creature. our creature, our externalized flow, is much closer to us. the processor is, after all, a human tool. the creature, the machine, is not some metal thing with camera eyes - WE, and our machines, ARE the machine.

allow me double back to make my point as clear as possible: when reading a poem, the reader creates in their mind multiple understandings of that poem which coalesce into a partially unified interpretation. the reader is "cocreating", in duchamp's words. however, that action takes place entirely within their minds - there is no externalization. even if the reader were to write down their interpretation on paper, that act is wholly independent of the purpose of the poem. the medium of the poem (and of writing in general) does not require the reader to reciprocate its verbosity. why should it? the medium of writing is not conducive to it - the words are printed or spoken and cannot be altered in a stream at will. only the artist has that monopolistic right. games break this down - they require explicit interpretation to occur entirely within the context (spatially, temporally) of gaming. name any art that has this requirement!! ANY! the rocky horror picture show, phish concerts, dada art, these were mere foreshadowings (and rightfully narrow in their appeal).

games are the only art form that can fully externalize flow - this capability is its essence. and from that essence, a brave new world will emerge - these are no mere dragon's teeth of king cadmus - this is no mere mustard seed of the son of man - this is a universe within the flattened, glowing snowglobe on our desk and that is our universe.

to contrast this new form of art from the old, i will call it dynamic art. ce n'est pas "l'art pour l'art", c'est l'art de l'art! (it's not "art for art's sake", it's art from art!)

keep up, keep up! this white rabbit has too many places to go!

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on games (a first revision and concatenation of two parts)...

Thu, 06 Oct 2005 05:46:51 GMT

the following is a revision and merging of the first and second parts of "on games" posted earlier as two separate entries. the third part of the series will be revised and reposted under the new title of "on flow..." at a later date.

"man kann sagen, der begriff 'spiel' ist ein begriff mit verschwommenen rändern..."
in 1907, stewart culin culminated a lifetime of researching games and his theory of gaming when games of the north american indians was published. culin distinguished between "games of chance" and "games of skill" - his terms are intriguing, but i have yet to find a copy of his book so i do not know how he finally decided to define "games" much less "chance" or "skill". the quote in the subtitle above is from wittgenstein who struggled with the word "game" - his entire concept of "language games" is based on an exploration of the many games we play through the use of language, though he didn't believe that was exactly the case. he believed that language was merely analogous to games - i believe that they are identical concepts.

it is appropriate that he uses the word "verschwommenen" (blurry) to describe the concept of games, because i believe that with the right pair of glasses, "wir können eine grenze ziehen" (we can draw boundaries) for a more general purpose. it is interesting that these words were published in 1949, just as the first electronic computer was being born in a secret government laboratory. if wittgenstein had lived to see the potential of the computer in 1972 (the birth of videogames), he would likely have recanted much of what he wrote in philosophische untersuchungen (as he did for tractatus logico-philosophicus). but as we will see, his central point on "spielen" is not so different from mine about "games".

die familienähnlichkeit...
the trouble with games is that without the EIflow model, they bear little real resemblance to any other artform. in fact, it is difficult to see them as mediums in themselves: few would argue that games include other media, but to say that the game itself is a form of communication... that's a stretch to many thinkers. because of this difficulty, state legislators and even the federal government are stomping all over first amendment rights by passing laws restricting the sale of videogames. it is not surprising, then, that challenges of said laws generally succeed on the one charge of unconstutionality. but in order for games to be fully protected in the future we must accomplish two things: we must define "game" as clearly as other arts are defined, and games must be recognized as "art". on the first problem, wittgenstein famously said that the only thing all games have in common is a "family resemblance". the second is a growing movement on the part of game designers, but it has not picked up momentum in academia. but those of us addressing these problems should take heart from history - cinema, photography and recorded music have all had their identity struggles and they have largely succeeded. with the beat of history's drum in our feet, let us march forth to face our destined foes!

yoo hui mi hak...
one approach to untangling this mystery is to analyze the word "game" itself. but since english words do not retain ancient meanings very well, let's look at another language: korean. in chinese-korean characters there are two words to describe "game": "yoo hui" and "oh rak". the first one combines two characters meaning "play" and "rules". my livejournal icon has both. it could loosely be understood as "something played according to a system of rules". "oh rak" is two characters meaning "entertainment" and "play (music)". in fact, the character pronounced "rak" is used in the word for musical instrument. "yoo hui" is rarely used in korea today, but "oh rak" is actually used in every day speech ("oh rak shil" means "gaming arcade"). the only native korean word for game that i know of is "nori" related to to the verb "nolda" which means "to play". that parallels the german word "spielen" - "i play the game" translates to "ich spiele das spiel". of course, the number one word for "game" in korean is just... "game" - an unfortunate reminder of the ongoing american military (and cultural) occupation. in french and spanish, the verb and noun for "game" are the same ("jouer" and "jugar" respectively). in fact, i have yet to discover just why english has two separate words. both words are from old english but neither appears to have any surviving relatives in modern german (though there is a word "gaman" in older german meaning "entertainment"). my gut feeling is that the closest word to "spielen" would be "play". "game" seems to have roots in a different usage (as hinted by its original meaning related to the quarry of hunts and its connection to "gaman").

play the piano, play some quake... [resume revising from here...]
in many human languages, the word "play" seems to be key to defining "game". ("entertainment" or "amusement" are often frequently attached to the meaning of games but i will address that separately - for now, i will assume that they are not even slightly relevant to the definition.) even in english we say "to play a game". it is no coincidence that the word "play" in english is ambiguous in that it equally applies to games and to music. in some languages a different verb is used ("chida" or "to hit" in korean and "tocar" or "to touch" to name a few), but the point remains that at the core of the meaning of "to play" is the image of interacting with something - a game or a musical instrument. whether tapping wasd or performing "turkish march", our fingers hit keys - keep this connection in mind for the next part - don't let go, we must jump together!

break a leg lanéra...!
the standup comedian must dodge the rockets of audience boredom as he nails the funny bone over and over again with rail gun accuracy, delivering punch lines with efficiency - gotta save ammo, but can't miss a single opportunity to bring in the laughs. every so often, the comedian pauses, the silence matching the agonizing moments when you've lost your deathmatch opponent, then BAM! you're smacked hard, out of the blue, and the audience explodes in red, chunky laughter. humor is one of the finest of arts - but it is interesting that nobody has satisfactorily explained it. but if you have played a one-on-one deathmatch in quake, you understand.

live comedy is a performance art, as are dance, singing, acting, magic, speech, and playing an instrument. when you analyze the major structures of performance arts, you end up with certain classes of externalizers and internalizers. the choreographer, screenwriter, speech writer, and composer fulfil the role of the primary externalizer. the audience would be the final internalizer. in between you have two more crucial roles to fill - the performer and the instrument. the performer takes the instructions of the primary externalizer, internalizes it, then externalizes the actual performance. but the performer cannot do this alone - she must do so through the use of an instrument. this is very different from saying that the composer and screenwriter are required to use the instrument of text to convey their art concept to the performer. in performance arts, the requirement of an instrument is absolute whereas the primary externalizer could easily replace text with vocal communication or even visual diagrams. in other words, the instrument, in performance arts, is just as significant as the performer, and the two together are absolutely essential for beauty to flow from primary externalizer to final internalizer. for the singer, his instruments are his breathing, vocal cords, and mouth; for the dancer, the outer body; for the actor it is the body and sometimes the voice; for the musician the musical instrument and all physical functions necessary to operate it; for the magician it is his poise, his bag of tricks and sleight of hand. and finally, for the game, the instrument is the computer, the performer is the gamer, the primary externalizer is the developer's studio, and the final internalizer is... JUMP!

this rope was like no other - i could see where it began, but the end was a wavering, looping, infinite thing...
the parallel stops there - we must take a leap. if all art forms can be represented by standardized arrangements of roles, then a new arrangement must result in a new art. it is not enough to say that games are related to performance arts. saying that text is related to film or poetry to sculpture is valid but not enough to establish an identity. if anything, what strengthens identity is a difference of perspective. games are different in that besides the performer, there are no more human internalizers! in fact... there is no final internalizer! it has been said that the internet has no end, that people lost in a forest end up walking in circles, and so it is with games. while other arts have a significant point of departure and arrival for the flow of beauty, games DO NOT! for now, it is safe to say that games do something special to flow. beyond that, beyond that is much much more.

time
stop
go
stop
flow
time
mine
die
live
time

probably the most ancient game still played today that nobody would deny is a "game" would be "baduk". it was invented in china thousands of years ago. it was introduced to korea very early, and exported to japan in medieval times. it was only around the turn of the last century that it finally arrived in the west as "go". ever since the first game of baduk, man has externalized his mastery of time. that is what the odd twist of flow at the end of games represents - it is a loop - a loop of flow. when flow loops, it creates its own sense of time. this special power of games needs elaborating.

do the wasd dance...
the first thing i teach kids when i introduce them to first-person shooter games is the importance of dance. dodging rockets and the snipers' crosshairs while accurately gunning down a foe requires a pirouette here, a tango step there, and a bit of swing with the precision of a competitive ballroom dancer and the taunting flair of the sort found in night clubs.

in dance, music, and in games, the regulation of time is essential. even the simple, digital controls of the NES required the analog control of timing to make mario jump to any effect. time is continuous and variable, but inescapable. a mighty river cannot be stopped easily, but it can be controlled - time is the greatest river of all. i talked before about how different mediums have different patterns of flow, but in understanding games, it is essential that we recognize revolutionary methods of controlling flow - not just of time but of ideas and identities. it would be stupid to brush off the hoover dam as just another way to control a river's flow - it is much more than that. let's look at games more carefully.

in dance, the dancer is no master of time - he is a master of timing. but in games, the medium enables mastery of time itself. in age of empires and civilization, entire epochs pass in a matter of minutes; in starcraft a siege tank produced in the time it takes to gulp down some ramyun; in final fantasy, the player can spend thirty minutes planning each step of a battle that, to the monster, may appear to last only forty seconds; in max payne, the character can pop a pain reliever and pop a thug's skull in the time it takes for a bullet to be dodged. in baduk, a game of three hours can tell the story of the rise and fall of a bacterial culture living for a few minutes or the epic of two battling empires. how is this possible? what magic does the game studio weave? what they have achieved is externalization of process!

i wrote about how "play" is too ill-defined to help us understand what a game is. but we can approach it better if we see games as true externalizations of process. though all art is "externalization", we must recognize that every medium has limits as to what it can externalize explicitly. music externalizes sounds and unidirectional sequences of sounds. text externalizes letters and unidirectional sequences of letters. movies do the same for images, photographs - images in two dimensions, and plays - scenes. games? - process.

games externalize process.

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on identity (first revision)...

Tue, 04 Oct 2005 09:43:10 GMT

the following is a revision of this earlier entry.

i'm debating whether or not this explanation of identity should come before "on violence", be incorporated into it, or left alone in its current place. to keep it as it is would retain the original chronology of my thought process, but "on violence" invokes this definition of identity proactively. this essay is not a complete understanding of identity. in retrospect, i was missing the concept of the heart, mind and body that i've developed more recently. still, it is worth considering identity as a concept on its own - we postmoderns struggle with it all the time. also, in retrospect, i realize that this essay captures the essence of what i've internalized from nietzsche's philosophies - very interesting. well, here it is:

the circles of life...
in order for violence to exist, in order for there to be internalization, there must be a sense of identity. as we did for violence, let's explore identity through a concrete illustration:

it helps to draw it out on paper.
lightly draw a small circle with your name in it. then draw several others with the names of your friends, also lightly. then draw lines connecting you to them. each line needs a label (best friends, went drinking last night, makes me laugh, used to live together, etc.) you could almost call them shared memories. stop when you have over three or four dozen lines. now draw a larger circle or boundary that represents the extent to which you feel that those many shared memories are a part of you. draw it again, adjusting as you go - do not erase old ones. do the same for your friends (it helps if they're there to draw their own circles). your circles may in fact overlap with parts of your friends' circles - they should. in fact, some of you may even completely encompass your friends within your greater circles - it may even be mutual. what you are doing is exploring the boundaries of self identity. the lines are fuzzy of course - that's why we draw multiple circles to approximate degrees of identification.

i'm 78% american, 30% korean, 60% korean-american, and 100% me...
all of this overlapping and fuzziness may seem troubling from a classical perspective. the lies of the enlightenment have convinced many to always believe that this is this, and that is that, that all things can be definitely understood, categorized, and measured. yet today's physicists know that the real world is very fuzzy and that multiple identities are the rule rather than the exception. neutrinos shift between three different types as if they had a mind of their own, two or more electrons can occupy the same point in space, photons can be in multiple places at once, and the boundaries of an atom are so frustratingly fuzzy that mathematicians have become gamblers and started calling odds! but one does not need to be a scientist to understand the foolishness of "enlightened" and classical worldviews: just take one good look at an mc escher work, or american tax laws, or that excellent movie, the usual suspects. confusion, mistakes, randomness, fuzziness - we do not live in a simple world. human identity is probably the greatest "fuck you" to the enlightenment (and its successor: modernism). keep that in mind.

agito ergo sum...
"free will" or "agency" are only truly demonstrated when we shift the boundaries of our circles - through violence. call it "reinvention of self" or "assertion of identity" but the circles are more than that - when you pick up a stone on the ground, you have drawn a circle around it. it is a model of our very existence and interaction with the universe. questions of science and art must begin with an understanding of the self.

it is easy to feel superficial - a word too easily spoken, a smile resting lightly on a troubled face, or clothing that feels less like a second skin and more like a burden. it is also easy to feel too deep - an awkward separation from the "normal" world, loneliness, disdain for others mixed with longing for a human touch...

both poles of behavior are one thing: the unwillingness to draw circles any larger. it is an unwillingness to externalize or internalize, a rejection of violence of all kinds. imagine your soul, the deepest representation of who you are, as a figure - dancing within the circles. draw your circles too small, and you have no room to dance. dance, as the most beautiful manifestation of freedom, is a truly good thing. true, larger circles means experiencing more pain and pleasure - more violence. but the will cannot exist without pain and pleasure. and in the end, it is better to have danced and died, then to have never danced at all.

draw your circle larger-
come, i'll also draw mine.
a little more-
let them overlap.
this ground,
whose is it?
does it matter?
draw your circle larger-
so where they meet
we can dance together.

(then there are those who draw their circles very large, but when they dance, they ignore other dancers and get in the way, bump people aside, steamroll smaller dancers, hog all the attention. some like to call such people, "americans". kidding aside, such dancers need a sound beating. no, really.)

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on violence (first revision)...

Mon, 03 Oct 2005 11:31:12 GMT

the following is a revision of this earlier entry.

this essay is a mess. too many important concepts are crammed together, leaving little room to give each the full attention they deserve. but that is how i think - ideas develop in my head faster than words. i'll have to split it up into several essays at some point. but for now, i think i've successfully improved clarity, added relevant references, and connected it better to the overall flow of essays. as always, i am famished for feedback!

lex talionis and newtonian physics...
EIflow is not a prescriptive model - it is descriptive. and often, the flows that it describes are violent. the murderer externalizes hate as a twitch of the finger, it flows through the barrel, and the victim, quite literally, internalizes the bullet. and violence is multidimensional - any victim of rape will tell you as much. the extent to which an action is "violent" constitutes a moral calculus of sorts. courts generate cold numbers and pages of formal text in an attempt to externalize our social reaction to violence. and there is the ever present temptation to draw sharp lines of judgement: that is a crime, this is not; that was a violent act, this was an artistic act; don't hit girls, she's a deadly assassin hired to kill me.

dawkins versus midgley...
instead of explaining violence in terms of EIflow, let's explore it through three seemingly separate questions.

much research on sexual abuse concentrates on the psychological effects. to anyone familiar with it, the reasons are obvious. but to some, it seems strange that such an explicitly physical crime would leave its deepest scars almost entirely on the mind. the relationship between mind and body is a lasting mystery, but it is in times of extreme trauma that we see the similarities and connections between them. violence against the body and the mind are of a similar sort. but as i've said before, and will continue to say ad nauseum, i do NOT believe that the mind and body are somehow purely separate and equal elements (or even unequal). why else would physical actions cause mental damages, and why else would mental damage lead to destructive physical behaviors? also, we cannot deny that both mind and body are easily wounded, can heal over time, can atrophy or grow, and have complex internal structures. violence is the same sort of dynamic wherever it strikes. especially in questions of gender relations, similar sorts of violation occuring to both mind and body to varying degrees regardless of gender. there is injustice in acknowledging physical violations committed by men against women while NOT recognizing mental violations by women against men (or vice versa et ad recursum). in recognizing the roots of injustice in gender relations and sexual trauma, we can come to a more unified understanding of violence in general.

"you broke his nose and wrote 'white trash' on his shirt in his own blood? good job son!"
the second matter came up in a conversation where i stated that i was going to have my children learn martial arts and beat the shit out of racist classmates. when my friend heard this, she was appalled that i would support physical violence in any way - especially by teaching it to children. she offered a real-life example of how a diplomatic resolution would be more effective. at first i stood by my statement out of stubbornness, but in the end, i started thinking of how such violence could be justified. once again, my justification assumes that mind and body are not discretely separate entities, and that violence against the body is of the same sort as violence against the mind.

i won't be voting for that bitch in 2008...
the final question is that of my personal stance on violence in videogames. i've gone this way and that on the issue because honestly, though most modern games are quite violent, they're really fun! then again, i also realize that this ubiquity of violence is a shock to minds unused to our beloved medium, and such minds are also willing to go so far as to make up lies and even claim that games are not a medium! this antagonism is familiar to me, having grown up with a family that didn't understand gaming, but these days it's getting ridiculous. "honorable" senators and small-time, attention-whoring publicists (one and the same) are bashing games left and right without regard for history, aesthetics, and common fucking decency. to make matters worse, game companies, so often demonized, are often willfully fulfilling the dark prophecies of our enemies! at some point they forgot that their job was to make good games and have started matching lies for lies, hiding easter-egg sex games, and behaving like regular corporate assholes! the sick irony of all this is that the liebermans and clintons will only stop attacking games when game companies do what the rest of the media industry has been doing for ages: buy the senators off. let's not go into any more details. let's just say, i'm mad, and feeling violent. let me fly a pair of bombers over this battle field, drop some verbal blockbusters, and renovate the landscape - i will redefine violence.

pleasure and displeasure...
we need to rewrite our understandings of pain, pleasure, and violence. nietzsche claims that the will cannot exist without "pleasure or displeasure". in the gay science (part 127) he claims that "only in intellectual beings" can "will" be found, but over the years he gradually changed his position - first by extending "will" to living things, and finally to all "things". what's interesting about this, is that if all things have a "will", then we must ask which came first: sensation of pleasure/displeasure or will? in terms of EIflow, "will" is related to externalization and sensation is related to internalization. as of yet, we cannot answer this properly. so we cannot ignore the possibility that the two are codependent. but let's examine the connection between externalization and violence:

whenever an art idea is transmitted to the senses and received by an internalizer, a boundary is crossed - the fuzzy, uncertain boundaries of self and identity. cells ingesting large molecules will first deform their outer wall to form a pocket to receive the target. gradually, the pocket deepens, and finally it pinches off and separates from the rest of the cellular membrane. it is like a cell within a cell (properly called a vacuole) - a foreign object shielded, from complete assimilation, only by the layer of native skin it wears. the molecule has violated the boundaries of the cell. we cannot know for some time if the ingested molecule is beneficial (a complicated word) or not. "the scroll was like honey in my mouth, but became bitter in my stomach." this delay in recognition is unavoidable in this example and many others. that is what permits violence. in the case of rape or assault, the victim, like most humans, has internalized an image of their body. what is being harmed is the body and its image. therefore, there is little to no delay in recognizing the intrusion as hostile. but regardless of how the dynamics of rape may appear dissimilar to a far milder violation of the person, the mechanics are the same. a boundary is crossed, there is recognition after the fact.

the power to interpret...
such is the nature of violence in its true form - intrusion of the boundaries of self and a recognition of the intruder as welcome or not. that is why the matter is so subjective. an ignorant american prejudging a korean to be good at math but unartistic is intruding on the korean's internalized image of himself. the ear has already heard, the brain has already processed - there is no "taking back" of the violent words. it is then up to the listener to judge the intrusion as welcome or not. but that is our power as internalizers. for the simple medium, there is so much less freedom: when we speak, we violate the inertia of air molecules, violate the eardrums of a passerby, the levels of charge in the listener's brain cells; when we drive a car we disturb the peace of the gravel on the road, the bird cannot hear its own mating call, the steering wheel resists your hands with inertia and friction; the movie shows a disturbing scene and the eye sees before it can shut out the images... these are all violent externalizations. even beautiful things, "beneficial" things, are inherently "violent" in the sense that i am using it. when you walk by me and my eye catches your beauty, my mind has been violated. i cannot erase your face from my memory. the surgeon violates the flesh of his patient in order to save a life - ah surgeons, mass murderers of countless somatic cells! a pretty girl says "hi!" to the shy boy and his only reaction is an expression of shock - she wonders if he's mad at him. violence is not always a good or bad thing - it is a sword with no designated owner. all of these examples are mere variations of the same color. we can only conclude: all art is violence.

the pen is mightier than the sword...
"art is violence" yes, but such a statement may jar our traditional definition of violence. one such definition is that an action that does not do (permanent) damage is not violent. a finger caressing your ear does no damage, though it does intrude on the senses of the ear's owner. even for mental violence, we usually call it "violent" only if the person is changed for the worse by the experience. perhaps this is valid. it is certainly useful for communication. however, it denies the uniqueness of each human being in a terrible way - "for one, a thing may be a sin, but not for another". different stimuli at different times, to different people, have different effects. and even those effects are not so clearly divided between "damaging" and "not damaging". such categories oversimplify the diversity of experience in life. any notion of justice must take into account the agency of the internalizer to NOT internalize a thing. furthermore, damage of the mind and body can heal to a great extent - technologies of science and the humanities can assist in their respective domains. even things that are obviously inflicting physical or mental wounds can have beneficial effects - a surgeon's scalpel or a painful reality check from a friend. the art of war and the art of literature merely represent extremes of the spectrum of violence. we must never forget that. bloody wars have been justified by mere lines of text, and the wings of peace are made of fragile paper. but the point here is that regardless of whether or not "damage" was done, all externalizations, all art, is violence.

when all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a skull...
edward said and richard wright both understood this very well. said explained the violence of some palestinians as their art - what painting can you paint when you are too poor to buy even a brush? in wright's native son, "bigger" thomas's only art is murder. when your environment does not permit you to express yourself as you wish to, to externalize what you feel on the inside through legitimate means, you become a criminal. can't get a job, can't live in certain neighborhoods, can't pursue my dreams, can't meet who i want to meet, say what i want to say, do what i want to do, WHAT IS THERE LEFT TO DO? fuck, pray, and get violent - that's what's left to do. the hebrews in egypt were enslaved - they're reaction was to fuck like rabbits and multiply, pray to their g-d for deliverance, and finally, bring down horrible, violent plagues upon their captors. that is the art and violence of the oppressed - ignore these truths at your own risk.

"welcome to fight club"
let's come back to the problems given at the top. in the first case, by calling all intrusions "violence" we can safely say that physical and mental violations are of the same sort. what differentiates them is a matter of taste - aesthetics. what is sweet in one mouth can be bitter in another's. and what was bitter in the mouth can be sweet to the stomach. tastes are based on experience and biological uniqueness. however, the experiences of taste are very much dependent on the currency of stimuli. a society that represses physical violence will spawn subcultures with a taste for it - connoisseurs or deviants are collectors of rare currency. but currency is usually generated through diffusion (popularity) - tastes for violence can be acquired. many postmodern women now have a taste for criticizing and even demonizing the sexist, shallow male. and so they express great distaste when a man attempts to intrude on their space with catcalls and crude pick up lines. however, men are not used to being intruded on by women - that sort of violence lacks currency. they don't know what their tastes are (rather, those tastes are not as well developed as women's). but women should not wait for the hour hand of "experience" to teach men to be true connoisseurs of women. men can very well ride the minute (or second!) hand and "acquire the taste" from women. the second step of a walk is usually lighter and easier than the first. pioneers! women! do not rest on your laurels! (metrosexualism may be the beginning of such a "second step" trend. it begins with clothes. it moves on to minds!)

"son, never let down your guard. next time, be equally ready to accept a hand of friendship or break his arm."
teaching my children martial arts would seem to go against my personal tendencies towards (and spiritual agreement with) nonviolence. however, i believe violence comes in two varieties - disciplined and undisciplined. i'll have to explore this new dimension to a deeper extent later, but my instincts tell me that these types are crucial to understanding the ethics of violence. to put my thoughts out clearly, let's see examples of both kinds, for physical and mental violences.

undisciplined physical violence would be akin to crossing a national boundary using brute force. disciplined violence would be to cross at a checkpoint with papers. in a way, "disciplined" is synonymous with "formalized". i'll get back to this connection. but for now, it seems to me that flailing your limbs at racist school children is inefficient and leads to more negative violence (i'm all too familiar with this). disciplined violence, usually in the form of martial arts, would be efficient and teach bullies to either get smarter or stay away. unfortunately, it is unlikely to stop them from harassing someone else. and teachers would punish both parties. my kids will get presents at home to compensate.

mentally, there is little difference. i cannot emphasize that enough. yelling and screaming and cursing is a form of undisciplined mental violence. such children are attempting to scare away their bullies by intruding on their mental states. this is also inefficient and leads to more negative violence - at best, the bullies will only yell and scream back. in fact, undisciplined physical and mental behavior becomes little more than entertainment for a stronger foe. a disciplined mental response would be like what my friend described - diplomacy. in her example, the victim called the parents of her tormentors directly and calmly told them exactly what their children had done to her. that is still violence, but it was coldly and efficiently directed. those children won't touch her again. but once again, they'll just find someone less disciplined to pick on.

violence is not the final answer. a surgeon violating the flesh of a patient may remove the tumor, but can he prevent further illnesses? no. nor will scaring bullies into leaving you alone stop them from picking on others. and if violence of any sort is not a final answer, what is? answer that and the universe will never ask you another question.

99% perspiration...
violence is art. and so discipline is a dimension of art. undisciplined, spontaneous art can have positive effects. such things are called miracles and inspirations and other names related to the divine. but that's a different matter - not insignificant, but outside the domain of my current arguments. for the vast majority of "geniuses", discipline is a crucial factor. before picasso could paint cubism, he had to copy the works of traditional artists to learn the discipline of painting. before einstein could write about relativity, he had to learn the discipline of math. and so, with this understanding, i will address violence in videogames:

"headshot!" "double kill!" "unstoppable!" "godlike!" "killing spree!" "humiliation!"
games are by nature, fully formalized. but that does not mean they are disciplined in every way. beyond the artwork itself, there are the flows to all the various externalizers and internalizers involved in the gaming process. all of that must be formalized also. then it becomes a true discipline. until then, games will be undisciplined. and it is no surprise that the subject matter of such games often depict undisciplined physical violence. that sort of violence is formalized in the language of gaming (and in the language of machines). that is a good first step. words like "frag", "melee", "rape", "dominate", "snipe", "headshot", are ways of formalizing the violence of gaming. if someone feels that violence in games has gone to far, then do what early man did - give the monster a NAME. only then can the HERO slay it. that is the power of disciplined, formalized art - the power to identify a problem. but then there is the question of tastes. perhaps when the current generation of naysayers finally dies off, violent videogames will not longer be scapegoats.

i used to think rare steak was disgusting, sashimi scared me, and cooked vegetables were the antithesis of food...
the exact nature of the offensiveness of videogames is generally that humans identify with characters on the screen that are being killed or violated. and so, to kill a human representation in a game is to do violence to your the viewer's human identity - at least, that is how they think of it. i believe this is also a matter of aesthetics - we think nothing of the violence inflicted on tom by the ever-smiling jerry because we do not identify with tom in any way. but a live-action movie where our favorite character is brutally killed after a dramatic fight scene will easily disturb audiences. yet both tom and jerry and the action flick are of the same medium. i believe videogames possess the same flexibility. once we understand that the identification we have with the characters in games is not inherent to the medium but rather a construction of our minds, we will no longer find quake and gta so offensive. simply put, it is a matter of taste.

next, i will describe my concept of identity - a key concept for understanding this essay on violence and my theory of ethics.

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on my theory of art (part one) (first revision)...

Sun, 02 Oct 2005 04:24:07 GMT

the following is a revision of this earlier entry.

a note on my numbering system:

i count from zero. so when i say that this entry is "part one" that means that it's actually the second entry on the topic. the first one would be "part zero". but writing that out seems unnecessary so i leave it out. here is the second entry on my theory of art:

did you know it's cheaper to move books as mail than as parcels...?
the universe of art and science cannot exist only as bright points of light in a dark night sky. the final detail missing from my model of externalizers and internalizers is a proper understanding of what flows between the stars in our universe. the spider's web at dawn may appear to be little more than a bright constellation of dew droplets suspended in midair. however, it would be much to the detriment of the butterfly not to realize the connections between things that compose the beautifully deadly web. if the web of artistic and scientific activity is like the postal service, then we have already described the roles of the sender and recipient in the first part of this essay. what we have not looked at is the exact natures of the letters and the postmen that carry them.

iostreams...
art ideas do not simply travel straight from a primary externalizer to some final internalizer. there is a flow of information and that flow has varying velocities, volumes, locations, and directions. just like a river. furthermore, these flows are not always linear or even singular. many flows can operate simultaneously, intertwining or running separately, merging, splitting, even running in opposite directions while side by side (consider the many lines of work required for a modern big-budget film). this is no overextension of analogy - these are realities. it would even be fair to characterize externalizers and internalizers as the critical points responsible for shaping and directing flow - as dams, forks, culverts, rapids, etc. that is how central flow is to understanding this theory.

the taming of a river...
to better understand what flow is, let's look at some examples of how it works in common art forms. as we said earlier, each art form represents a standardized pattern of externalizers and internalizers. therefore, it follows that each art form also has a distinct pattern of flow.

very short poems have a very simple pattern of flow. the poet condenses the storm of thoughts in her mind into a handful of words and phrases. externalization starts flow. in this case, the flow is extremely dense - low volume, high mass. by "low volume" i mean that in terms of observable output, there is little to see or hear. by "high mass" i mean that each word and phrase, by virtue of their abstractness and richness of meaning, they carry much content. of course, mass and volume are relative concepts (in art as well as science). a long poem would be high volume in comparison, but much lower than a movie or game. it would also likely be lower in density, though there are amazing exceptions (i'm thinking in particular of t. s. eliot's the wasteland.)

another factor to consider is the location of flow. poetry's location is unique in that today's literate population does not read nearly as much of it as in the past. but it is also arguable that today's poetry makes up for lack of volume per capita with an incredible increase in density. each word in a poem today has accumulated that many more centuries of weight than a poem from the times of shakespeare. furthermore, though the word "love" in a sonnet by shakespeare may have retroactively acquired the weight of the same word in a poem by sylvia plath, the contemporary usage lends more power to plath. whatever retroactive weight shakespeare may have acquired, its power is of the purely artificial "historical sense". not that there's anything wrong with the artificial, but like all things constructed, it requires effort on the part of the reader.

finally, there is the direction of flow. poetry is interesting in that it lasts a very long time despite the early deaths of so many poets. the flow of beauty from poet to reader is one-way. no fan of sylvia plath can have their praises heard by their goddess; shakespeare is missing out on centuries of commentary on his work; emerson will not be given more opportunities to converse with his greatest fan nietzsche. but what is interesting about poetry is that even when the poet is alive the flow is almost always one-way! i certainly know this from experience - i can't remember the last time anyone gave me feedback on my poetry! invitations for pity aside, this matter doesn't seem to deserve mention: isn't is obvious that poetry is a one-way street? the same is true of almost all literature, nearly all films, certainly photography, and at least equally true of sculpture. but i believe that this assumption is false, and for a long time, i have been puzzled as to why people believe such a thing! any child, upon discovering that their favorite book was written by a human being just like them, will entertain notions of discussing the book with the author and perhaps taking him to school on plot deficiencies and distasteful characterizations. perhaps that is why i have such a fixation on the deaths of writers. to me, that is when writers truly move beyond excuses: "can't catch me now! i'm DEAD!" but for the living artist, our new concept of flow opens up new possibilities of analysis. for example, we can analyze more complex art forms and find patterns of flow that resemble those of simpler ones. perhaps then we will understand why the author hides behind a wall of paper and the director behind the silver screen.

a river not only has volume, direction, and location, it has velocity. this is one of the most interesting characteristics of flow because it is the only one directly related to a sense of time while still strongly affected by the same factors determining the others. velocity is perhaps the strongest indication of distance between participants in the artistic process. concepts of alienation, degrees of separation, these originate in the variations of velocity more than volume, direction or location. one of the best demonstrations of this special property is seen in the life of the modern novel.

an author has a great story. she writes it down, messes with it, agonizes over the first sentence, the last sentence, kills off a character, resurrects another, moves a mountain to a more convenient spot, shifts events in time, is g-d for few hours a day for a few years. the flow between author and manuscript is extremely high velocity and bidirectional. she then submits it to the accursed publisher and has to stew for what seems an eternity. at this point flow has slowed to a crawl - the dialogue between author and publisher is bidirectional but frustratingly slow. finally it is published. the flow picks up as it now multiplies and enters each printed copy. but then disaster strikes! sales don't pick up right away, the flow has slowed to a halt as it sits on dusty shelves - the burning tragedy of it all! but then, let's say someone picks up a copy...... 200 years later... and reads it for the first time. the sun rises on a mind's horizon and thoughts thaw and begin to flow - forming new rivers in her mind.

as we can see, the variations in velocity of flow can be quite dramatic. of course, for some purposes it is not even practical to speak of "velocity" per se because such incredible variance (and multidimensionality) can become impossible to measure. speed is a more useful concept in such cases. velocity is a function of distance traveled between two points, including all points traveled in between. speed is a function of the distance between only the first and last points. (for example, if you were to start from your home and walk in a giant circle and end up back at your place, your velocity might be very high but your speed would be close to zero). speed is a useful measure for media like literature where the work of art can remain relatively unchanged (in a sort of stasis) indefinitely.

velocity and speed of flow also affect direction of flow. in the earlier example, the incredibly slow speed of flow means that the reader will never be able to discuss the book with the author (200 years is too many suicide attempts - the author's survival is doubtful). all of these factors are interconnected. a familiarity with math and science will help in understanding this web of concepts. but a more familiar analogy will suffice: geography.

maps...
flow of art and science varies according to geography. a river will speed up, slow down, change in volume, mass, direction, and location as it cuts through rocks, bounces down slopes and relaxes in flat lands. human beings are a significant geographic feature akin to a river basin or lake - we affect flow quite dramatically. text, motion pictures, carved stone, software, biology, anthropology, history, geography, all arts and sciences represent types of terrain over which information will flow. the relationship between flow and geography is complex. the flow of human interactions has changed the landscapes of many parts of the world; glaciers grind mountains into hills and create valleys; plants break down stones; shellfish become stones. art and science, the flows of information and artistic action, all of these are interconnected. it comes naturally to us, with our greater capacity to internalize, to capture these flows. in doing so, we move forward.

this is how they accelerated light to 300c...
here i must clear up an inevitable confusion. i spoke of varying volumes of flow. i am NOT, in any way, disparaging text or dance or other low volume media. even in the world of text there is a charm to the haiku; in painting we can appreciate the solid colors of a kandinsky; and a catchy chorus line with only four or five words is catchy for a reason. also, low volume communication often carries with it an aura (or shadow if you prefer). one should never mistake what is actually being externalized with this shadow. but the shadow is there. often it is a very personal shadow - an actor's performance tinged with extra emotion because of a real-life crisis, the impression of motion in a painting of ballerinas, a cryptic song title hinting at a hidden chapter in a composer's life... these shadows and auras are everywhere in art. high volume art can also have a shadow but not as often. the more that is externalized, the less there is to communicate implicitly. externalization is explicit. but explicit processes often yield implicit results. let's not be confused about this: the actual flows of a river are distinct from shadows and footprints.

E I E I flow...!
to internalize is to know;
to externalize is to make;
everything is connected by flow:
you and i, the universe, our minds.

and so we have modeled the nature of all things. this model is called EIflow - it represents the three primary components of art and science: externalization, internalization, and flow. i will be refering to the EIflow model often in the future. the next question to answer is on violence and personal identity - the beginnings of my theory of ethics.

[special copyright applies to this entry. see bansuki's user info for details.]

on my theory of art (second revision)...

Fri, 30 Sep 2005 07:49:36 GMT

the following is a revision of this earlier entry.

a big change (that affects everything i have written so far) is to replace certain redundant terms with externalize and internalize. the terms being replaced and the corresponding replacements are as follows:

externalize:
initiate

internalize:
respond
symmetrify

externalize, internalize, externalize...
first we must understand art as a process of communication and effect. what is being communicated is information of varying volume, quality, and velocity. the nature and arrangement of the entities that affect this flow of information are the significant parts of art. as james joyce observes, in portrait of the artist as a young man, all beautiful things possess a harmonious arrangement of the parts of a whole and the whole resonates with the heart of the observer. we are now exploring the exact nature of what he separately calls arrangement of the parts and resonance. resonance roughly corresponds to a function of flow which i will describe in detail later. arrangement is better understood in terms of externalizers and internalizer.

parts of a whole...
the primary components of art are externalizers and internalizers:

the externalizer is the entity responsible for making an art idea accessible to another's observation. separate the externalizer from any humanity - think of it more as a function. the internalizer is the entity that receives the art idea and is affected by it. the art idea itself is carried by a medium. all major art forms and art works are a map of externalizers, internalizers, and media with the art idea flowing all throughout. however, and i cannot stress this enough, the elements of this map not only overlap, they are recursive! this level of complexity is what often complicates any meta-understanding of art. this produces special entities that are really composites of the more basic parts. in fact, as we shall see, even media is such a special case.

all rules have exceptions (except the rule that all rules have exceptions (exce...
performers are such a case - they are a composite of externalizer and internalizer. they respond to the music, the conductor, the director, the script, and initiate a performance unique to their artistic vision: the act of interpretation is a function of the synergy between externalization and internalization. actors, musicians, singers, and dancers roughly fit this special role. another special case is the combination of medium and performer as seen in dance, singing and acting. finally, one of the most delightfully bizarre, (but often effective) special cases is when the work of art refers to itself or to one of its parts such as a poem about writing poetry or a movie that makes it obvious that it is, in fact, a movie.

is it useful...?
to demonstrate the usefulness of analyzing art along these lines, let's break down a very common art form:

all art forms are standardized arrangements of the primary components. a piano piece starts out as a melody, bouncing and tumbling through the composer's mind: that's the art idea. she externalizes this music as a sequence of notes and notations on paper: the medium. she passes it to her friend, an excellent pianist, to try it out. the pianist reads the music and internalizes it as a memory in her mind and in turn externalizes it as a beautiful, playful performance on the piano: another medium. the piano, itself a complex of internalizing and externalizing, puts out sound waves: a very common medium. the sound waves are received and internalized by an illiterate housecleaner who externalizes her resulting joy by humming along to herself as she daydreams about a happier life - the life she sees in the piano piece.

ghost of laplace stirring...?
it may seem strange to some - this notion that such complex beauty can be woven from such simple threads. but look at your computer screen - the best monitors can display a range and richness of color that far exceeds human capability. yet computers generate those colors using sequences of mere 1s and 0s. your monitor externalizes those many colors using just three primary colors - green, cyan and magenta. and your eyes perceive those colors using only two factors - the orientation and energies of photons. what i am describing here, is nothing more than a world of senders, recipients, and a postal service. would one ever discount the richness of a meaningful letter because of the simplicity with which it was delivered? this is NOT reductionism - this is clarity of understanding.

transcendent understanding...
all of this has a very significant point that will build to my main idea, but for now, consider the incredible implications of such a model for art. a simplified model not only allows for a scalable understanding of art, it also allows for a deeper understanding of the relation of art to humanity, the world, and other things (after all, isn't that the point of a model?). this scalability and connectivity to the larger universe supercedes semiotics and similar concepts because it extends beyond humanity. and in many ways it is more honestly human. we will trace these lines of thought farther in later writings.

epilogue...
the piece she had heard many years before, she hummed to her youngest daughter in the few happy moments of her rather unhappy life. that little girl drew pink and blue lines in her mind's eye linking the smiling face of her mother with each note of the piano piece composed many years before. she then grew up and took hold of the threads of her mind, wove new patterns, beautiful, in pink and blue, in new colors as well. she then composed her own music, created her own happy life. she became the greatest composer in history.

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on portable music...

Thu, 29 Sep 2005 07:45:08 GMT

i just got an ipod nano. the first time i went out for a walk with music blaring in my ears (pelican, if you're interested) i had the strongest sensation of being in a game! there i was, my avatar, the game map, and an amazing soundtrack. i really must explore this feeling further!

one idea that came to me was:
what if you could switch songs depending on your immediate mood through some super-intuitive interface? then truly, it would be a soundtrack worthy of comparison to myst's. i hate to admit it, but it would also add a significant "cinematic" feel to an otherwise ordinary scene of life.

-bansuki

a quiz with results relevant for my philosophy!

Fri, 23 Sep 2005 19:23:14 GMT

so this is a bit personal, but the exercise really helped me generate more ideas for my philosophy. there was a bit of redundancy, but it is quasi-randomly generated so oh well.

LJ Interests meme results

dorothy parker:
she's jewish, she's hot, she's a poet, and she was deliciously dark!
game studies:
a century from now, people will be quoting me as one of the founders of game studies - just you wait!
gender studies:
sexuality, on multiple levels, is so deeply connected to aesthetics. feminism, homosexuality, the politics of sex, i can't get enough of it!
korea:
i'm korean. such a simple statement, but it is an evolving concept for me, having grown up separated from big-city, korean-american culture and from korea itself. i travel there every summer now in an attempt to grow roots and plot big things for my future.
ludoaesthetics:
this is my own word - it's a look at beauty and art through the premise that all things can be gamed. reflexively, it's a philosophy of viewing games as art. my livejournal consists entirely of essays on ludoaesthetics.
media studies:
studying the ways in which we use "the many extensions of man" as marshall mcluhan puts it - it's epistemological and ontological, has huge implications for ethics and aesthetics. media studies from a philosophical perspective is only half the big picture, but it's certainly the more visible half (no pun intended)!
new media:
this is kind of a misnomer. i believe that games are the newest medium, but they are fundamentally different from older media. "new media", when referring to games, is more accurately described as "transcending media". this aspect of my philosophy gives the reflexiveness of ludoaesthetics a direction, an entropy. wow... this is good stuff.
orientalism:
edward w. said is my hero. when i found out about his death i was heartbroken. they say he refused to stop writing even to his last days, and only stopped lecturing when he couldn't stand any more. i'll never forget reading his masterpiece orientalism and its sequel culture and imperialism. his ideas on traditions of representing "the other", along with segalen's l'exotisme form the basis of my own theories.
postmodernism:
i see postmodernism as the incomplete but necessary revolution, but

she's on life support.
neomodernism has its finger on the switch.
she is our mother - will we:
let him do it?
do it ourselves? (and retain some dignity)
or with superhuman effort
revive her.
teaching:
every summer in korea i teach english. it pays for school. i love teaching and being a teacher. i hope to do so in the future as a professor to infect thousands of young minds with my ideas and change the world. my dream is to found a liberal university in korea and start a postmodern revolution there. if that revolution were ever to turn violent, priests and politicians would go to the wall before teachers. teaching is a sacred profession.

Enter your LJ user name, and 10 interests will be selected from your interest list.

on externalization...

Fri, 23 Sep 2005 17:45:36 GMT

i realize there has been a serious omission on my part - i have failed to adequately describe externalization. i will attempt this here:

symmetrification takes on a new significance - it justifies the seemingly arbitrary, harsh line drawn between noise and silence. externalization, as originally described (in my own notes especially) almost seems to discount the inner world of the mind. so here is a more elegant, unified understanding of the crucial terms of my theory of artistic action:

each initiator and respondent is a mind and body entity - the mind aspect is a symmetrification (albeit inaccurate and incomplete) of the outer, larger world. externalization occurs when the heart opens and allows flow from mind to body (internalization would be the reverse). and so the heart, mind, and body are defined according to the parameters of functions: externalization and symmetrification (or internalization). the flow itself is, of course, data.

the heart is described as a gate - a lock on a canal or sluicegate. "out of the overflow of the heart, the mouth speaks." the "heart" as used here is a composite of the heart and mind. the mouth is a metonym for the body.

the body is the real - the mind is born from the body, but now the body has attached its identity to the mind as a mother attaches herself to her child. the mind, the child, bears a family resemblance to the mother, but soon the child will supplant the parent - the parent will fade away and linger as a memory. i'm reminded of the movie ai where the robot child essentially sacrifices his mother in order to add one more memory of her - it was a powerful moment of mind versus body and revealed the unique advantages and weaknesses of each.

man is a tree - the earth is the real, the skies are the mental. our roots are our body and our branches and leaves are our mind. the horizon is the interface. (reproduction happens from the mind.)

[special copyright applies to this entry. see bansuki's user info for details.]

on love (first revision)...

Fri, 23 Sep 2005 01:25:29 GMT

the following is a revision of this earlier entry. i'll be revising and/or rewriting all of my stuff over time, but the originals will be kept the same (except for minor editing).

love...

first, mind/body dualism.

i instinctively dislike it, but just as an ant very clearly has a head, thorax, and abdomen, the mind and body are distinct at their extremities but certainly all parts of a whole. so the most accurate relationship between mind and body is that they are similar (or analogous) elements of the human identity. that in no way makes them equivalent or identical. wittgenstein would use the word "family resemblance" to describe such a relationship. moving on:

love is food for the heart - the heart is the interface between mind and body. love, in this stricter, purer sense, is about body and mind. the attraction may be limited to one or the other, but that is an intrinsically unstable arrangement.

attraction is like the allure of a restaurant. some may be pulled in by the colors of the building, the catchy advertisements on the windows or the intriguing name. others may approach based on a friend's recommendation, the pleasant smells floating from it, or the smiles on the faces of the patrons within. attraction is like that. it is imprecise but compelling; superficial yet convincing; strong on the senses but separate from true merits. you may enter the restaurant and find out that the food is terrible, the waiters rude, or the environment all wrong. there is much room for deception - and only walking into the restaurant will resolve the instability of attraction. in science, this is called collapsing superpositions into a classical state through the act of observation.

the mind and body are parts of a whole - they overlap, intertwine and become inseparable. to "love" one but not the other, to find one "attractive" but not the other, is a problem. any woman who has a fine body and face will know how this works - they are "loved" for their "attractive" body, but what of their minds? most men, long favored by society (and still the case) know that they can live with this inequality. and their "victims"? "well, who cares what they think? they don't think!" claim these men.

the feminist movement has, with increasing success, demonized such men as exploiters and the women who fall for it as weak. prostitution and pornography and rape thrive on the ancient theme of the woman as physical object and the man as thinker who claims the female object with his mind and body. edward said would tell us that colonialism, eurocentrism, imperialism, and similar ideologies all find roots in the mental and physical conquest of "the orient". the parallels are striking - the mental conquest of the female, the "other", preceding the grasping action of the soldier and businessman's fist. and the injustices that result are equally striking in their similarities.

women, demonstrating the complexity and flexibility of the oppressed, have countered this by finding men who can fulfill the needs of their minds while more typical men fulfill the needs of their bodies. those men who are fulfilling the female's mental needs are in a unique position. like the woman being used for her body, these men are being USED for their MINDS. this is also, unjust. but because that sort of situation is not as common (until recently), it has not gained social currency, and therefore, the placing of blame and the assigning of criminal roles is not easy nor well justified. it would be like accusing a white american of racism - in the 1940s.

we scorn the man who uses women for their bodies because we are so used to criticizing the status quo - we liberals, and in a terrible manifestation of sexism, we easily overlook the reverse situations. yet we thinking men and women are also MORE likely to use each other for our minds! that is because our freedom of thought, our depth of experience and boundless creativities have created a truly SEXUAL, MENTAL appetite! and these mental intercourses are easily dismissed as not sexual because the social currency of such notions is new. consider a man: scorned by others because of his appearance and/or circumstances - an ugly duckling or a caliban. consider how such experiences and isolation have fed his mind, and so his pride in his mind has grows. it becomes his primary asset and source of self worth! then, consider how precious it is for him to engage with another mind! the experiences surrounding such an event would bear strong resemblance to the near religious obsession with physical virginity in most modern (even postmodern) cultures!

BUT! let's not forget - mind/body dualism is false. the two are inseparable and codependent. have NO illusions that this man can simply abandon his hated body and become a being of pure mentality. bullshit. he is human - he will go through puberty. caliban will lust for miranda, and the ugly duckling will begin to grow the beautiful plumage of a swan ready to mate.

let's not simplify and generalize about love. no arbitrary lines thrown here and there will hold back the turbulence that exists in the grey realm between mind and body. is this discussion a mere quibble over semantics? could be. but in using words, let us be sensitive to the grey realities unique to each heart. men and women demonstrate much ignorance of those realities (or perhaps negligence?) and the result is prostitution and rape.

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on neomodernism...

Fri, 23 Sep 2005 00:05:28 GMT

in the us, we may be seeing the birth of a new era to follow postmodernism. first, a quick look at what "modernism" means to me:

modernism is a period in american (and western) thought characterized by a faith in progress - especially through technology and social sciences. its central pillar is rooted in the enlightenment - a faith in numbers and formulas - a rejection of romantic ideals and mysticism. modernism came of age at different points for different cultures. korea has only recently reached its modernist height. for the us, it coincides with the high point of american empire - roughly the early 20th century (with the notable exception of the great depression). deep cracks in modernism began to appear after world war two though hairline fractures probably go back many decades (like the "lost generation" following world war one).

what followed was postmodernism. it attacked the sweeping universals and generalizations and scientific faith of modernism with an offensive so diverse that to this day scholars are not sure who or what exactly is "postmodern". but their goals were clear - to oppose, supplant, or destroy modernism. scientists in particular, hate postmodernism. but as i have said before, postmodernism, in its fury to dismantle the sciences, failed to turn its critical eye on the heart of the humanities. in other words, the death of postmodernism is premature.

i say it is dying because the ugly, geometrically perfect head of modernism is raising itself once again - this time as neomodernism (or postpostmodernism). the warning signs appeared in the 80s and it's approach became a hurricane in the 90s. with a minor setback during the dotcom bust, it is now licking its wounds but still strong. soon it will prepare its next attack. where modernism was naïvely optimistic, and postmodernism was constructively pessimistic, neomodernism is nonchalantly, selfishly optimistic. it is characterized by a faith in technology, but coupled with no desire for progress. fortunately, it lacks the systematic imperialism and racism of modernism, but that is small comfort when you realize that the selfishness of the neomodernist is now directed at countrymen and foreigners alike. technology is not evil - faith in technology is. for what is technology other than an extension of man? and to have faith only in oneself is a destructive thing (narcissus).

i realize that what i am calling "neomodernism" is very similar to "neoconservatism". that would be correct - but "neoconservatives" are by no means true conservatives (it's like those wacky communist countries tacking on "democratic" and "republic" to their names). "neomodernist" is a more accurate description. a longer, most accurate, term would be "antiprogressive modernists" or something like that, but it's too long.

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on games and freedom...

Thu, 22 Sep 2005 23:20:35 GMT

the failure of humanism is refusing to explore the integral connections between ethics and aesthetics. postmodernism's failure is that it did not deconstruct humanism.

those failures are linked to a misunderstanding of the concepts of "ends" and "means". in fact, it would be better now to simply discard those terms - especially "ends". "means" are no more than extensions of agency - that is, media (mcluhan describes this concept well in understanding media though unfortunately he limits it to humans). "ends" are static art ideas. we know now that dynamic art completely encompasses and surpasses the static - let us completely replace "ends" with games. there are no "things" in the universe - just games. to treat a game as a medium is to be a lich - but as überliches we maintain an awareness of the "gameness" and the "mediumness" of all that we formerly knew as "things". (it would be impractical to return to that state of elvish innocence where all things are games and games only.) keeping these truths in mind, let us return to the issue of games and freedoms:

games are the pinnacle of aesthetic experience - freedom is the end of ethics. the relationship between games and freedom is a crucial one and they are almost identical concepts. a multiplicity and diversity of games is directly related to an increase in freedoms; a good game allows more constructive freedoms. amartya sen tries to describe how freedoms are the means and the ends of human development. but he does not understand the true nature of "ends" as we explained above. a related problem (one that strikes close to my heart) is that this sort of ignorance is what leads many to disdain and even despise games as "pointless" - games ARE the point!

here i must step back and clarify what i mean by "gaming". simply sitting down and playing the same videogame for hours on end is NOT "gaming". gaming, in the sense that i use it, is an all-encompassing worldview. it means to not only play many, diverse games, it means to find games in all we do - work, play, eat, rest, etc. it means to find freedom where you once did not - see opportunity in all things.

obviously this expansion of gaming should be accompanied by an expansion of real freedoms such as political rights, economic independence, social mobility, access to information, etc. but i firmly believe that a culture raised to play games will demand these real freedoms and fight to have them. we are seeing this already in the form of free software movements, open source, opposition to patent and copyright abuse, hacking commercial products, etc. i see it as no surprise that the most active participants in such movements are also members of or allied to gaming culture.

and perhaps the most important effect of increasing freedoms through gaming is the lowering of risks. a poor game is one in which only a few moves lead to continued play and most lead to a game over. such a game lacks freedom and the corresponding increase of risk is painful. a good game does NOT need high stakes. (beat this monster or the UNIVERSE WILL EXPLODE!) such devices are borrowed from film and literature, but IRflow makes it pretty damn clear - games are a totally different thing.

the lowering of risk through freedom is fundamentally different from being "risk averse". averting risk is a symptom of a lack of freedom. this phenomenon should be familiar to anyone who studies the history of the gaming industry or hollywood - the risk averse culture industry is responsible for much of the risky, unstable excesses of america. we should not avert or evade risk - we should game it.

when risks melt away, when freedom is free, we have transcended humanity and humanism - that is the nature of transhumanism (AKA antihumanism). gaming risks is what will allow us to continue being creative in an age of increasing physical comfort. the alternative is growing apathy and complacency and decadence.

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on symmetrification...

Thu, 22 Sep 2005 20:01:50 GMT

most people are familiar with the concept of "reflection". but reflection is inadequate. i wrote on storms of creativity before - those storms are not merely reflections.

consider a mirror - when you look into it, you see a face. all you see is a face. i once had an argument with a fellow student in high school about this sort of problem. i was insisting that although our space consists of three dimensions, the human eye can only see two. the only reason why we see depth is because our brain combines the images from the parallax effect. and even depth does not reveal all three dimensions to us - the human brain exists in three dimensions, but can you see it under the skin? we only see two dimensions. similarly, a two dimensional being would only see one dimension (all things would appear as a line). and to one dimensional beings, all things would appear as zero dimensional (all things would appear as dimensionless points). this student insisted i was wrong. i hope you agree with my argument - it is crucial to understanding symmetrification.

symmetrification means to look in the mirror and then not only see your face but to recreate in your mind the spark of life behind the face. it means to read a book and not only sympathize and empathize with the characters, it means to bring them to life in your mind separate from the book! and this only gets better with games - games encode that spark of life explicitly in their rulesets. to symmetrify a game means to understand the heart of a game. all good gamers symmetrify the games we play. another word (though weaker) to describe this would be "to internalize".

symmetrification is what allows an initiator/respondent node to become a supernode (metanode). it is also what allows a medium to do the same. in mathematical terms, it is a manifestation of recursion.

to put it differently, symmetrification is nothing more than superdimensional reflection across an axis of interface. what makes it more difficult in practice is that our perceptions are not easily superdimensional - recursion is difficult to consciously conceptualize.

this is why the power to manipulate time, the fourth dimension, is so crucial. fantasy and symmetrification are linked. the power of fantasy to effect positive changes for the future is linked to our ability to symmetrify - they feed off of each other.

symmetrification is the source of true empathy - to gaze on the face of a beggar and "put yourself in his shoes". the "shoes" are metonymous for a more complete internalization, a superdimensional reflection on the human condition. it results in a deeper understanding of the identities of others.

coming back to the image of the storm - we must stop standing in the rain just soaking it in - we must dance with the violent winds in the clouds - the storm must be rivaled by a storm of flow in our minds and bodies. the world we live in is growing increasingly stormy - lest our identities be mere leaves on the wind, we must match the outer pressure of the world with an inner pressure of storms. marshall mcluhan describes how modern man must expand his consciousness in order to stay afloat in the rising waters of electric media. we are now in those times but unequally. disadvantaged people all over the world are missing out - we have an ethical responsibility to address their needs.

i will never forget a scene in high school - i had just finished discussing the latest high-tech videogame with a friend when i noticed one of my mexican friends passing a 3.5 inch floppy disk to a friend excitedly describing the joys of scorched earth. scorched earth is a great game. but it's incredibly primitive. their means of transfer was equally primitive - the game can be easily downloaded over the internet but they were using a floppy disk. at that moment, my heart felt a surge of sadness and joy: joy that they were enjoying a game i also enjoyed, sadness that the socioeconomic realities of the world presented a gulf between me and them. i hated having to call my friend a "them". we must destroy walls of inequality, and those of us amongst the "haves" must reappreciate the beauty of simple games. today's complex games have a dishonest taint - and dishonesty makes symmetrification difficult. the result is an overall loss of empathy - empathy for a friend whose computer can only play scorched earth, as if that were some mark of shame.

and this power to symmetrify is not limited to humanity (in either sense). antihumanism or transhumanism teaches us that symmetrification is the process through which we understand our place in the universe and our relation to all things. it places all conflicts in perspective and all perspectives find their place. this is a scientific understanding of art and an artistic understanding of science. more on this later...

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on honesty and the ethics of art...

Thu, 22 Sep 2005 03:51:36 GMT

honesty is not a virtue-
it is a scalpel and a razor blade and a sword.
truth does not speak speak all well
of the one delivering it.
a scalpel is best entrusted
to the medically trained,
a sword should not be handled
by just anyone.
and beware of poets-
they are not doctors nor warriors-
they are not inclined to employ the blade
of honesty.

honesty is not transparency of the heart. the heart is the interface between body and mind. if there is any honesty of the heart, it exists only in the eye of the perceiver - the heart is revealed only to the wise. "honesty" must be restricted to the flow from and to the heart. nietzsche's gay science, part 335 explains this in greater detail (interesting that we came to similar conclusions).

also in gay science (part 84), nietzsche quotes homer: "many lies tell the poets". when read out of context, the quote seems misplaced because it ends a section on the magical power of poetry. the poet's truths and lies, all of it becomes the artist's power to move even the gods to dance - and where, in all of this, is honesty?

before we answer that, we must trace the path of the poet's lies from their ancient, magical origins to an as-yet undisclosed place. nietzsche makes it clear that the original lies are the attempts of certain men to explain natural phenomena to their fellows - they are the beginnings of mysticism. when mysticism faced the demands of early civilizations it evolved into religion. when religion faced the demands of modern thought it evolved into science. at the root of all these was the desire to provide more and more satisfactory answers to the earliest questions that the poets gave false answers to. so then, what motivated the poet to lie? lust for power.

to know something that another does not - that is a sort of power. the überlich tells us: in life, expect nothing good, expect nothing bad, expect nothing at all; a power comes from creating expectation; a weakness comes from expecting. knowledge, even false, creates expectation. but it is too early to say what sort of power is involved here - answering that would go a long way towards an ethics of games.

but certainly, all power involves violence to some degree. and we understand violence well. the violent/artistic act is largely defined by the identities of the entities involved. false "expectation" is nothing more than overextending ones sense of identity. this opens the expecter to violence from the one wielding the power of knowledge.

in terms of the IRflow model, this implies that the art ideas passed from initiators to respondents can be false and used to reduce the freedom, the security, of the respondent. it's like a dishonest person giving counterfeit money away or a news broadcast sowing propaganda into listeners' minds. power is being generated at the expense of another. THAT is the nature of dishonesty. therefore, honesty is flow that does not redistribute power unequally. in that sense, there is much dishonesty in the publishing business.

this also strongly implies that aesthetics and ethics are closely linked. the artist and the politician, both must avoid dishonesty. artists especially are blind to this sort of dishonesty for it can manifest even when the truth is told! remember that dishonesty is defined by a flow of power that favors the perpetrator at the expense of the victim.

i am reminded of conrad's novels and the methods of sauron in lord of the rings. conrad and sauron could not be more dissimilar persons, but what they had in common was the ability to reveal truth in a way that discouraged freedom! edward said and chinua achebe explained this very well, but their point was that conrad's gritty, real exposure of the evils of imperialism had a depressing effect on the reader. conrad could NOT imagine that the natives of the colonies would someday rise up and fight for positive changes; he could not imagine that by the late 20th century, all of the world's great empires would lose nearly every bit of land they had conquered. his inability to see a greater truth, his confidence in the truth he saw before his eyes, reveals his honesty to be dishonesty - of the most insidious sort.

similarly, sauron uses the palantír in minas morgul to send visions of dark reality to the stones of minas tirith and orthanc to push denethor into manic depression and saruman into a power trip. it is notable that sauron never used the stones to fabricate visions and outright lie to his victims - all he needed was the truth.

it is this sort of power that the artist wields. i wrote before about the promise of fantasy. the "lies" of fantasy can be an honest, positive force to lift mankind up from their human chains and dance with power and grace. this "power" to liberate is TRUE power.

i wrote earlier how honesty concerns flows from and to the heart and not the heart itself. it was also written that the heart is an interface. interfaces, in their best form, are games. good games are characterized not by their simplicity (as many have suggested). rather, good games are notable for the transparency/simplicity of input to and output from the game. imagine a game where you only get to do one of two things - push button A, push button B. when you push button A, seemingly random, flashy graphics fill up the screen. when you push button B, seemingly random, flashy graphics... wait... this is no fun! at the opposite extreme, you could have a game with incredibly complex rules that could take years to fully understand - but the interface is a simple 8 by 8 grid and a set of well-defined game pieces: chess. let us make more honest games - let us be more honest people. in doing so, we become great trees with roots deep in the dark earth and leaves in the highest heavens - we become more than human.

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on love (part 1)...

Mon, 19 Sep 2005 20:33:09 GMT

i have answered one of my deepest, knottiest questions - finally.

here is the question:
i spend much (perhaps excessive) mental effort to judge all i think and do. when my judgement fails and all i have left is instincts and desires i seek justifications - some rational justification for each. if i cannot resolve even that for a particular thing, i grow irritable and insecure. so you will understand that it is particularly troublesome that this question has gone unanswered for most of my life. the question - the problem is: my lifelong desire for a girlfriend, soulmate.

the only good reason, the only ethical reason, is that a longterm partner would be a reliable "sounding board"; i have discovered that my productivity multiplies tremendously when someone lends me their attention. furthermore, i feel the most empathy when another similarly becomes more productive because of my attention to them. empathy and productivity are worthy ends for a longterm relationship.

so here's the real question:
why not friendship? and truly, friendship with a man would be more productive because i would not be distracted every millisecond. so that kills my only good justification for wanting a girlfriend. what then?

the answer (but not a solution):
its a bit complex and/or unique to my psychology, but here goes:
it would help to read this entry.
to intellectuals, productive dialog is a sexual act: when i create an idea jointly with another, that idea is like a baby, and we are its parents.

so is it strange, then, that when i meet someone with an engaging mind and we have just had mental intercourse, i feel a strong urge to kiss them and start stripping them? and it feels SO natural! i get sexually aroused just thinking about it!

but if the object of my amorous advances is a straight male, we have a problem. worse yet, i simply may not find that person's body or personality attractive. then it seems unjust to take advantage of their mind and ignore their body. somehow, advancement to higher levels of mental engagement seems hollow (and even improbable) without similarly engaging their body. perhaps having been (and being) the victim of such injustice has made me sensitive to it (though this sensitivity long preceded realization that i was a victim).

the following can apply also to men (but if you are from a male-dominated society, that would be extremely unlikely).

it is in the interests of women to fight against the arbitrary compartmentalization of self. not only is it a symptom of oppression, it encourages stereotypes and feeds into a greater cycle of more oppression:
when women compartmentalize themselves, it frustrates men that are willing to give them credit for possessing beautiful mind and bodies. those frustrated men will then take it out on weaker women and on society as a whole - thereby creating a feedback loop - the greater cycle of oppression.

this in no way excuses men: just as we should refuse to be victims, we should also refuse to abuse power. that is not to say that violence will ever end - permissive violence is necessary for life - we call it sex. call a thing what it is, hide no goods, let veils be guarded invitations and not walls of fear and ignorance.

unfortunately, my words are at best mere descriptions and not prescriptions of behavior.

the world, as it is right now, could not be any other way, than it is right now.

this sort of problem will have to be solved by überlichhood - more accurately, überhumanity - humans that have grown to grasp and become and/or incorporate both endpoints of human possibility.

to dance with power and grace...

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