https://www.gq.com/story/the-love-and-terror-of-nick-cave
And consequently I got the sense that I was still, at best, a ridiculous distraction to be tolerated. One night I ate with him and the Bad Seeds at an Athens restaurant, a fairly long and drunken evening. Eventually, perplexed and exasperated by the way I continued to take notes, he began dictating to me what I should write:
"... and I looked into his face and saw a world of true sadness that, being a mere journalist, I don't have the power to express. But it was there, believe me. A sadness from every pore. The Sad Man. Man of Sadness. And he raved on, and I saw that his tears were not only for himself, but for everyone. Especially me. And he put down his glass and wept openly, unashamedly, and with great... greatness. And then he belched. The saddest belch. A belch so full of sadness that I too wept, and cannot write anymore..."
At that point, he stopped dictating.
"There you go, mate. Wrote the fucking thing for you. Go home now."
The next day, he writes to me again, just a paragraph, ostensibly about why we are drawn to butterflies:
"Some say why waste your time believing in God when there is so much natural beauty and awesomeness around us. Some say that there is more beauty and wonder looking at a butterfly and I agree, butterflies are beautiful things, but if you get a human being to look closely at a butterfly, to look very closely and get some more human beings to look at that butterfly so that there is a collective of people all peering intently at the butterfly they will ultimately fall to their knees and worship that butterfly. It's the way humans are put together. I don't think that makes them stupid. I think it's kind of sweet. Until someone says well my butterfly is the true butterfly and yours is not and flies a plane into the twin towers."
He says now that even as he was writing [the script], he knew it would never get made, so he resolved to enjoy the process.
Saturday, 2 February 2019
Calire Colebrook - "The human world is not more fragile now: it always has been"
https://aeon.co/essays/the-human-world-is-not-more-fragile-now-it-always-has-been
It is because humans can fail to reach their rational potential and be 'everywhere in chains' that they must ever more vigilantly secure their future.
The most reduced, enslaved, depleted and lifeless terrains are still opportunities for 'humanity' to confront the possibility of non-existence in order to achieve a more resilient future.
These films whisper: take a second glance at the present, and what looks like a desperate situation might actually be an occasion for enhancement. The very world that appears to be at the brink of destruction is really a world of opportunity.
What contemporary post-apocalyptic culture fears isn't the end of 'the world' so much as the end of 'a world' - the rich, white, leisured, affluent one.
It is because humans can fail to reach their rational potential and be 'everywhere in chains' that they must ever more vigilantly secure their future.
The most reduced, enslaved, depleted and lifeless terrains are still opportunities for 'humanity' to confront the possibility of non-existence in order to achieve a more resilient future.
These films whisper: take a second glance at the present, and what looks like a desperate situation might actually be an occasion for enhancement. The very world that appears to be at the brink of destruction is really a world of opportunity.
What contemporary post-apocalyptic culture fears isn't the end of 'the world' so much as the end of 'a world' - the rich, white, leisured, affluent one.
Zadie Smith - "Dance Lessons for writers"
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/oct/29/zadie-smith-what-beyonce-taught-me
But Prince, precious, elusive Prince, well, there lays one whose name was writ in water. And from Prince a writer might take the lesson that elusiveness can possess a deeper beauty than the legible. In the world of words, we have Keats to remind us of this, and to demonstrate what a long afterlife an elusive artist can have, even when placed beside as clearly drawn a figure as Lord Byron. Prince represents the inspiration of the moment, like an ode composed to capture a passing sensation. And when the mood changes, he changes with it: another good lesson.
But Prince, precious, elusive Prince, well, there lays one whose name was writ in water. And from Prince a writer might take the lesson that elusiveness can possess a deeper beauty than the legible. In the world of words, we have Keats to remind us of this, and to demonstrate what a long afterlife an elusive artist can have, even when placed beside as clearly drawn a figure as Lord Byron. Prince represents the inspiration of the moment, like an ode composed to capture a passing sensation. And when the mood changes, he changes with it: another good lesson.
Karl Friston - "Consciousness is not a thing, but a process of inference"
https://aeon.co/essays/consciousness-is-not-a-thing-but-a-process-of-inference
I'm compelled to treat consciousness as a process to be understood, not as a thing to be defined. Simply put, my argument is that consciousness is nothing more and nothing less than a natural process such as evolution or the weather. My favourite trick to illustrate the notion of consciousness as a process is to replace the word 'consciousness' with 'evolution' - and see if the question still makes sense. For example, the question What is consciousness for? becomes What is evolution for? Scientifically speaking, of course, we know that evolution is not for anything. It doesn't perform a function or have reasons for doing what it does - it's an unfolding process that can be understood only on its own terms. Since we are all the product of evolution, the same would seem to hold for consciousness and the self.
It turns out that the Lyapunov function has two revealing interpretations. The first comes from information theory, which says that the Lyapunov function is surprise - that is, the improbability of being in a particular state. The second comes from statistics, which says that the Lyapunov function is (negative) evidence - that is, marginal likelihood, or the probability that a given explanation or model accounting for that state is correct. Put simply, this means that if we exist, we must be increasing our model evidence of self-evidencing in virtue of minimising surprise. Equipped with these interpretations, we can now endow existential dynamics with a purpose an teleology.
Now we can see why attractors are so crucial. An attracting state has a low surprise and high evidence. Complex systems therefore fall into familiar, reliable cycles because these processes are necessarily engaged in validating the principle that underpins their own existence. Attractors push systems to fall into predictable states and thereby reinforce the model that the system has generated of its world. A failure of this surprise minimising, self-evidencing, inferential behaviour means the system will decay into surprising, unfamiliar states - until it no longer exists in any meaningful way. Attractors are the product of processes engaging in inference to summon themselves into being. In other words, attractors are the foundation of what it means to be alive.
Nearly all our behaviour can be understood in terms of such uncertainty-minimising drives - from the reflexive withdrawal from noxious stimuli (such as dropping a hot plate) to epistemic foraging for salient visual information when watching television or driving. Second, the actions of such systems upon the world appear to be endowed with a purpose, which is the purpose of minimising not-yet-actual, but possible, surprises.
I'm compelled to treat consciousness as a process to be understood, not as a thing to be defined. Simply put, my argument is that consciousness is nothing more and nothing less than a natural process such as evolution or the weather. My favourite trick to illustrate the notion of consciousness as a process is to replace the word 'consciousness' with 'evolution' - and see if the question still makes sense. For example, the question What is consciousness for? becomes What is evolution for? Scientifically speaking, of course, we know that evolution is not for anything. It doesn't perform a function or have reasons for doing what it does - it's an unfolding process that can be understood only on its own terms. Since we are all the product of evolution, the same would seem to hold for consciousness and the self.
It turns out that the Lyapunov function has two revealing interpretations. The first comes from information theory, which says that the Lyapunov function is surprise - that is, the improbability of being in a particular state. The second comes from statistics, which says that the Lyapunov function is (negative) evidence - that is, marginal likelihood, or the probability that a given explanation or model accounting for that state is correct. Put simply, this means that if we exist, we must be increasing our model evidence of self-evidencing in virtue of minimising surprise. Equipped with these interpretations, we can now endow existential dynamics with a purpose an teleology.
Now we can see why attractors are so crucial. An attracting state has a low surprise and high evidence. Complex systems therefore fall into familiar, reliable cycles because these processes are necessarily engaged in validating the principle that underpins their own existence. Attractors push systems to fall into predictable states and thereby reinforce the model that the system has generated of its world. A failure of this surprise minimising, self-evidencing, inferential behaviour means the system will decay into surprising, unfamiliar states - until it no longer exists in any meaningful way. Attractors are the product of processes engaging in inference to summon themselves into being. In other words, attractors are the foundation of what it means to be alive.
Nearly all our behaviour can be understood in terms of such uncertainty-minimising drives - from the reflexive withdrawal from noxious stimuli (such as dropping a hot plate) to epistemic foraging for salient visual information when watching television or driving. Second, the actions of such systems upon the world appear to be endowed with a purpose, which is the purpose of minimising not-yet-actual, but possible, surprises.
Ben Medlock - "The body is the missing link for truly intelligent machines"
https://aeon.co/ideas/the-body-is-the-missing-link-for-truly-intelligent-machines
Humans are made up of trillions of eukaryotic cells, which first appeared in the fossil record around 2.5 billion years ago. A human cell is a remarkable piece of networked machinery that has about the same number of components as a modern jumbo jet - all of which arose out of a longstanding embedded encounter with the natural world.
Now, it's a bit of leap to go from smart, self-organising cells to the brainy sort of intelligence that concerns us here. But the point is that long before we were conscious, thinking beings, our cells were reading data from the environment and working together to mould us into robust, self-sustaining agents. What we take as intelligence, then, is not simply about using symbols to represent the world as it objectively is. Rather, we only have the world as it is revealed to us, which is rooted in our evolved, embodied needs as an organism. Nature 'has built the apparatus of rationality not just on top of the apparatus of biological regulation, but also from it and with it', wrote the neuroscientist Antonio Damasio in Descartes' Error (1994), his seminal book on cognition. In other words, we think with our whole body, not just with the brain.
The motivating drive of most AI algorithms is to infer patterns from vast sets of training data - so it might require millions or even billions of individual cat photos to gain a high degree of accuracy in recognising cats. By contrast, thanks to our needs as an organism, human beings carry with them extraordinarily rich models of the body in its broader environment. We draw on experiences and expectations from a relatively small number of observed samples. So when a human thinks about a cat, she can probably picture the way it moves, hear the sound of purring, feel the impending scratch from an unsheathed claw. She has a rich store of sensory information at her disposal to understand the idea of a 'cat', and other related concepts that might help her interact with such a creature.
This means that when a human approaches a new problem, most of the hard work has already been done. In ways that we're only just beginning to understand, our body and brain, from the cellular level upwards, have already built a model of the world that we can apply almost instantly to a wide array of challenges.
Humans are made up of trillions of eukaryotic cells, which first appeared in the fossil record around 2.5 billion years ago. A human cell is a remarkable piece of networked machinery that has about the same number of components as a modern jumbo jet - all of which arose out of a longstanding embedded encounter with the natural world.
Now, it's a bit of leap to go from smart, self-organising cells to the brainy sort of intelligence that concerns us here. But the point is that long before we were conscious, thinking beings, our cells were reading data from the environment and working together to mould us into robust, self-sustaining agents. What we take as intelligence, then, is not simply about using symbols to represent the world as it objectively is. Rather, we only have the world as it is revealed to us, which is rooted in our evolved, embodied needs as an organism. Nature 'has built the apparatus of rationality not just on top of the apparatus of biological regulation, but also from it and with it', wrote the neuroscientist Antonio Damasio in Descartes' Error (1994), his seminal book on cognition. In other words, we think with our whole body, not just with the brain.
The motivating drive of most AI algorithms is to infer patterns from vast sets of training data - so it might require millions or even billions of individual cat photos to gain a high degree of accuracy in recognising cats. By contrast, thanks to our needs as an organism, human beings carry with them extraordinarily rich models of the body in its broader environment. We draw on experiences and expectations from a relatively small number of observed samples. So when a human thinks about a cat, she can probably picture the way it moves, hear the sound of purring, feel the impending scratch from an unsheathed claw. She has a rich store of sensory information at her disposal to understand the idea of a 'cat', and other related concepts that might help her interact with such a creature.
This means that when a human approaches a new problem, most of the hard work has already been done. In ways that we're only just beginning to understand, our body and brain, from the cellular level upwards, have already built a model of the world that we can apply almost instantly to a wide array of challenges.
Religion has no monopoly on transcendent experience - Jules Evans
https://aeon.co/essays/religion-has-no-monopoly-on-transcendent-experience
Over the past five centuries, Western culture has gradually marginalised and pathologised ecstasy. That's partly a result of our shift from a supernatural or animist worldview to a disenchanted and materialist one. In most cultures, ecstasy is a connection to the spirit world. In our culture, since the 17th century, if you suggest you're connected to the spirit world, you're likely to be considered ignorant, eccentric or unwell. Ecstasy has been labelled as various mental disorders: enthusiasm, hysteria, psychosis. It's been condemned as a threat to secular government. We've become a more controlled, regulated and disciplinarian society, in which one's standing as a good citizen relies on one's ability to control one's emotions, be polite, and do one's job. The autonomous self has become our highest ideal, and the idea of surrendering the self is seen as dangerous.
Over the past five centuries, Western culture has gradually marginalised and pathologised ecstasy. That's partly a result of our shift from a supernatural or animist worldview to a disenchanted and materialist one. In most cultures, ecstasy is a connection to the spirit world. In our culture, since the 17th century, if you suggest you're connected to the spirit world, you're likely to be considered ignorant, eccentric or unwell. Ecstasy has been labelled as various mental disorders: enthusiasm, hysteria, psychosis. It's been condemned as a threat to secular government. We've become a more controlled, regulated and disciplinarian society, in which one's standing as a good citizen relies on one's ability to control one's emotions, be polite, and do one's job. The autonomous self has become our highest ideal, and the idea of surrendering the self is seen as dangerous.
What Boredom Does to You
http://nautil.us/issue/53/monsters/what-boredom-does-to-you
"Scientifically, daydreaming is an interesting phenomenon because it speaks to the capacity that people have to create thought in a pure way rather than thought happening when it's a response to events in the outside world," said Jonathan Smallwood.
It turns out that in the default mode, we're still tapping about 95 percent of the energy we use when our brains are engaged in hardcore, focused thinking. Despite being in an inattentive state, our brains are still doing a remarkable amount of work.
The areas of the brain that make up the default mode network - the medial temporal lobe, the medial prefrontal cortex, and the posterior cingulate cortex - are turned off when we engage in attention-demanding tasks. But they are very active in autobiographical memory (our personal archive of life experiences); theory of mind (essentially, our ability to imagine what others are thinking and feeling); and - this one's a doozy - self-referential processing (basically, crafting a coherent sense of self.)
Killingsworth and Gibert found that "people are thinking about what is not happening almost as often as they are thinking about what is" and "doing so typically makes them unhappy."
"Scientifically, daydreaming is an interesting phenomenon because it speaks to the capacity that people have to create thought in a pure way rather than thought happening when it's a response to events in the outside world," said Jonathan Smallwood.
It turns out that in the default mode, we're still tapping about 95 percent of the energy we use when our brains are engaged in hardcore, focused thinking. Despite being in an inattentive state, our brains are still doing a remarkable amount of work.
The areas of the brain that make up the default mode network - the medial temporal lobe, the medial prefrontal cortex, and the posterior cingulate cortex - are turned off when we engage in attention-demanding tasks. But they are very active in autobiographical memory (our personal archive of life experiences); theory of mind (essentially, our ability to imagine what others are thinking and feeling); and - this one's a doozy - self-referential processing (basically, crafting a coherent sense of self.)
Killingsworth and Gibert found that "people are thinking about what is not happening almost as often as they are thinking about what is" and "doing so typically makes them unhappy."
Ingei Chen - "The Neurons That Tell Time"
https://www.newyorker.com/science/elements/the-neurons-that-tell-time
Speaking with Buzsáki, I found myself wondering what my brain was actually sensing when I seem to feel time flowing, second by second, minute by minute. "It has to be measuring something else, such as a change or speed or acceleration, for which we do have sensors," Buzsáki told me. If that's the case, then "time" isn't an absolute thing that our brains can "track" or "measure"; it's more like an organizational system for making sense of change in the world around us and coördinating our lives.
"Of course time is change," Edvard Moser agreed. Another way to describe his lab's analyses of the L.E.C. would be to say that it uncovered changing sequences of activity during episodes of experience. "We call it 'episodic time' to emphasize that this is not 'clock time,' " he said.
Speaking with Buzsáki, I found myself wondering what my brain was actually sensing when I seem to feel time flowing, second by second, minute by minute. "It has to be measuring something else, such as a change or speed or acceleration, for which we do have sensors," Buzsáki told me. If that's the case, then "time" isn't an absolute thing that our brains can "track" or "measure"; it's more like an organizational system for making sense of change in the world around us and coördinating our lives.
"Of course time is change," Edvard Moser agreed. Another way to describe his lab's analyses of the L.E.C. would be to say that it uncovered changing sequences of activity during episodes of experience. "We call it 'episodic time' to emphasize that this is not 'clock time,' " he said.
James Propp - "How to be Wrong"
https://mathenchant.wordpress.com/2016/01/16/how-to-be-wrong/
The definition of an expert (attributed to physicist Niels Böhr) is, any person who's made all the mistakes that can be made in some narrow area of human endeavor, and has learned not to make those mistakes anymore. So making those mistakes is an unavoidable part of the learning process. Remember the movie Groundhog Day? The main character, Phil, eventually acquires various skills, such as playing the piano, throwing playing cards in a hat from far away, avoiding insurance salesman Ned, and wooing coworker Rita, but it's by messing up over and over again; he has to stick his foot in the same hole in the ground, or in his own mouth, a bunch of times before he learns not to stick it there.
The definition of an expert (attributed to physicist Niels Böhr) is, any person who's made all the mistakes that can be made in some narrow area of human endeavor, and has learned not to make those mistakes anymore. So making those mistakes is an unavoidable part of the learning process. Remember the movie Groundhog Day? The main character, Phil, eventually acquires various skills, such as playing the piano, throwing playing cards in a hat from far away, avoiding insurance salesman Ned, and wooing coworker Rita, but it's by messing up over and over again; he has to stick his foot in the same hole in the ground, or in his own mouth, a bunch of times before he learns not to stick it there.
Maker's schedule, Manager's schedule
http://www.paulgraham.com/makersschedule.html
Most powerful people are on the manager's schedule. It's the schedule of command. But there's another way of using time that's common among people who make things, like programmers and writers. They generally prefer to use time in units of half a day at least. You can't write or program well in units of an hour. That's barely enough time to get started.
For someone on the maker's schedule, having a meeting is like throwing an exception. It doesn't merely cause you to switch from one task to another; it changes the mode in which you work.
Most powerful people are on the manager's schedule. It's the schedule of command. But there's another way of using time that's common among people who make things, like programmers and writers. They generally prefer to use time in units of half a day at least. You can't write or program well in units of an hour. That's barely enough time to get started.
For someone on the maker's schedule, having a meeting is like throwing an exception. It doesn't merely cause you to switch from one task to another; it changes the mode in which you work.
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