Sobering Up Part IV

I'm working on the outline for Part IV. This whole time it has been sitting at the bottom of the page, looking all hyperbolic and silly, looking like it needs serious revising. But I didn't know what to do with it. It was full of silly militaristic metaphors that I had grown tired of.

I was tossing around terms like insurrection and battle like they really meant something. But the truth is they didn't mean a whole lot. They wanted to mean something, they wanted to signify struggle, but they just fall flat.

I don't know if you have ever taken a look at my Society's Implicit War essays (produced between July and August 2010), but I went off hard with militaristic metaphors. I was using those words left and right, analyzing this, analyzing that, going off. But that is no longer satisfying me. It is frustrating me. The SIW essays were based on Foucault's Discipline & Punish. I took his key terms as a given and decided to draw out their implications. Foucault endorses a very broad definition of power and politics, to the point that society itself becomes a war of sorts, and that our minds themselves become a battleground. This is what I was exploring in those essays. Where does peace end and war begin? What constitutes a political action? What would it mean to wage an insurrection of knowledge against the institutions? These are Foucault's ideas, his language.

But I've grown tired of it. I don't think it adequately captures the reality of what politics is, of what war and insurrection is.

So what I'm trying to do with Part IV is to avoid the use of militaristic metaphors that I had initially planned. Instead, I'm trying to turn it into a more sober inquiry into the relationship between politics, violence, war, culture, and art. I think there are serious questions to be asked about all of those things.

But the analysis cannot hinge on the notion of cultural or intellectual 'insurrection'. The idea is now falling flat in my mind, not making the cut.

So that is where I'm at in the project right now. It has been a while since I've written any of it, mainly because I've just been staring at the outline wondering what to do with it. It is coming together slowly.

I also know that I haven't been blogging much in general. But thats okay. Finishing Part III was a big deal that shook up my understanding of where I was at in my reading and writing. So I'm not committed to any large piece of reading right now, and I'm waiting on writing. Waiting is a fine thing to do. Over and out.

Nicholas Carr's "The Shallows" as Genealogical History: Some Rapid Reflections on This Exciting Book

So last week I started reading Nicholas Carr's book The Shallows: What The Internet Is Doing To Our Brains. I find it very compelling. I only have sixteen pages or so left. I plan on finishing it tomorrow morning on the bus. What a treat.

His main purpose is to argue that the way we engage with the internet is causing changes in our brain that lead to shallower engagement with written works, and thus leading us to shallower and more superficial forms of thought in general. He argues that books effected our brain by cultivating a focused, attentive, and contemplative frame of mind that was more inclined to intellect and creativity. He believes that the transition from the age of books to the age of the internet is bringing about a new type of mind in which we mostly think in these shallow and superficial ways. Thus the title The Shallows.

All of this hinges on two things that I can think of right now: 1. the science of neuroplasticity, which claims that our brain is plastic and changes throughout the entire life span as a result of experience, and 2. the idea that the mind is a result simply of the brain.

The former is a relatively new discovery in the neurosciences, and the latter seems hard to deny. I am digging the book.

It excites me for a lot of reasons and I am going to have to give it an extended treatment in later posts. I am even thinking that I will have to simply integrate it into my essay on The Principles of Art that I am working on. But I'm not sure how I would do that exactly. But I'll worry about that when I finish reading it and when I get further along in the writing of my next large essay project (which I'm not very far into yet).

But I would quickly like to say a few things that are really exciting me about The Shallows, simply to catalog and get my thoughts flowing a bit.

First, I just want to say that I really am enjoying Carr's literary style. He has a masters in English from Harvard and so writes with a nice flourish to his sentences. Not sure how to describe this exactly. I am in someways bad at picking up on the stylistic elements in writing. But I like the way he writes. I just like the way it flows.

I also like the way that he includes memoir in the book. He discusses his personal relationship with computers, what it was like for him to grow up while computers were first being created, and what happened to him later in his life. He talks about what it was like to write the book, how he had to adjust his writing, his blogging, his access to computers. You definitely get a sense of the person. You get a sense that he is deeply troubled by the way that he has been personally been effected by the internet. I like that.

I like it because it reminds me of David Shields. I really enjoyed Shields' Reality Hunger and The Thing About Life Is That One Day You'll Be Dead. Creative non-fiction is a very exciting genre to me, and Carr is doing a branch of it that I am very excited about. Interdisciplinary work that combines neuroscience, history, and contemporary cultural criticism. Uh, how loud do I have to say fuck yeah? I mean, really great stuff.

And I guess one reason I find it so compelling is that the central idea to all of it is neuroplasticity. I've read two books directly about neuroplasticity and have dabbled in some other stuff. I find it to be a very exciting field that his implications for almost every aspect of life. I think that it is really important stuff. So I'm glad to see that he is thinking about how the internet would be engaging with our plastic brains.

One of the most exciting things for me is something I wrote about in my essay of 8/30 'The Genealogy of the Modern Mind'. In that essay I claimed that neuroplasticity implied that minds and history were inseparable. Because brains are plastic, and change based on experience, then minds from different historical periods must look different. Therefore, if we want to understand minds, including our own minds, we must understand history.

Carr's book seems to function on this assumption that the quality of minds and history are inseparable. In particular, I like his chapter called 'Tools of the Mind'. He discusses how in different historical moments people engaged with different external tools to shape their minds. He uses neuroscienctific research on reading to show that literate people have radically different brains than illiterate people. He then speculates about how the invention of the printing press and the spread of mass reading changed brains and thus created new types of minds.

He then does a very good job of asking very 'modern' questions. I quoted modern because I am using the term in the way the Foucault defined it. He said that modernity was an attitude in which an individual tried to understand the nature of their own being by referring to history. That is what Carr is doing. He asks explicitly the questions 'how are the ways we think changing? what is the internet doing to us? what is happening to us right here right now?' Those are the quintessential modern questions. What is happening to me? And how can history help me understand what is happening to me right now?

I think that it resembles a work of genealogical history. He is using history to try and figure out what is going on with our minds right now at this moment. History is not simply there for its own existence, it is there to help us understand our situation and to act more intelligently in our situation. If you glance at my essay of 8/30, that is precisely what I am talking about: the use of history for a tactically useful understanding of the present.

In particular, he is doing a good job of dealing with the history of the industrial revolution, and the history of computers. He never makes explicit reference to Guy Claxton's work Hare Brain Tortoise Mind, but he tackles many of the same issues. He discusses how the industrial revolution and the rise of capitalist economies made efficiency paramount. He claims that these industrial and capitalist views of the economy eventually came to influence the way that people thought about thinking. Thought became something to be measured in terms of efficiency.

He also does a good job of engaging with the question of the rise of computers. The most important issue is the frequent metaphor of comparing the brain to a computer. This implies certain things about how thought 'should' work. But he says that the metaphor is wrong. Which of course it is! The brain doesn't process things in binary, or with algorithms. Clearly neurons work differently than computers do. Here I am pleased to see Carr falls in line with John Searle, a philosopher of minds, institutions, science, and other things. I like Searle, and he has been speaking out against comparing the brain to a computer since at least 1984. Good stuff.

This is all very cursory, but to summarize, I like Carr because he has a literary style that incorporates memoir into his creative non-fiction project. I like him because he recognizes the link between minds, brains, neuroplasticity, and history. He seems to be doing something that resembles Foucault's genealogical history, which I love. He is being so modern in his writing. I'm happy to see that the ideas I have been talking about, rather abstractly, can be executed as eloquently as Carr is doing it. I am also happy to see that he is (implicitly) lining up with Claxton and Searle by recognizing the role that the industrial revolution played in creating this overly 'efficient' and shallow mode of thinking, and by rejecting the comparison of the brain to a computer.

I do have one complaint, however. It has to do with the way that he is using Jeffrey Schwartz's book The Mind & The Brain: Neuroplasticity and the Power of Mental Force. I loved Schwartz's book. So exciting and interesting.

Carr has it in his bibliography, and I believe only quotes it once. It is a good resource simply because it legitimates neuroplasticity and provides good background information. But Carr fails to engage with the three most important aspects of Schwartz's argument: the notion of 'self-directed neuroplasticity', the relationship between Buddhist mindfulness and self-directed neuroplasticity, and the relationship between quantum physics and self-directed neuroplasticity. Yes, I understand that those threads can be hard to pull together, especially the quantum argument. But, I dunno. To me it seems like Carr is hinting or getting so close to the idea of mindfulness sometimes. He says that by being attentive we can combat the shallow thinking encouraged by the internet. Mindfulness is all about attentiveness. Perhaps he doesn't think the US would accept these ideas so readily, or get them. The quantum thing I can understand avoiding. It would be hard to talk about that without stepping into a lot of muck. Really fascinating claims, but really tricky stuff, especially given the Schwartz is a mind body dualist, which doesn't jive exactly with the rest of Carr's argument. But anyway, the bottom line is I find it disappointing how both Carr and Norman Doidge (in The Brain That Changes Itself) fail to engage with these crucial components of Schwartz's main argument. The link to Buddhist mindfulness is absolutely essentially.

Mindfulness could give us a way to exert meaningful self-directed neuroplasticity, and fight the enticement to shallow thinking that the internet is presenting us with. My ideas all come back to creative self-directed neuroplasticity. Schwartz's book is booming with hope for this idea, exploding with this idea that we can take charge of our brains plasticity and begin to change it for the better. I just hope that in the last sixteen pages Carr is able to enable some new form of agency in this world of neuroplasticity. I want Carr to give me tools to change my own life. He is certainly giving me tools to understand myself, but is that enough? How am I to convert this new understanding into meaning changes, not only in my life, but in my brain? Which of course would be the same thing.

I just want Carr to talk about self-directed neuroplasticity that is aimed at combatting the effects of the internet. But who knows. I'll finish it tomorrow.

Over and out.

Preparing for This Bad Boy: Getting Ready For My Inadequate Writing on Art

I am starting to make baby steps on my next essay, which was inspired by Collingwood's The Principles of Art. Baby steps. Just beginning the writing. I've written about four pages. Starting to realize how difficult the topic is for me. I have all these tentative titles jumping about in my mind and I have no idea which one I will end up settling on. The general themes that I am talking about are 1. art 2. the relationship between life and art 3. the idea that every action can be artistic 4. the idea that this art of life can be a form of activism 4. the idea that activism can be a form of war 5. that the ideas I explored in my Society's Implicit War essays can be connected to this idea of art as life

Basically I have been vaguely talking about art and creativity for the last month or so. But now that I have read Collingwood's analysis of art I have a fuller picture of what art is and is not. So now I have to try and revamp all of my old writing to reflect this new nuanced understanding of what really constitutes art. Also, I know that there are very legitimate connections to Foucault waiting for me. Foucault talked explicitly about 'the aesthetics of existence'. He talked about how our lives could become objects of beauty, how we could produce our lives in a way so as to make them works of art. The artistic life is real for Collingwood and Foucault. So I need to chase this idea.

All of these ideas are hidden from me right now. The outline I have excites me. It is going to change as I write probably. Some things will get moved around, some things will be added or removed I bet. But here is the outline of the project I am currently working on.

Part I: Defining 'Art Proper'

1. Artistic Expression in General: What is 'Art Proper'?

2. Art is not Craft

3. Art is not Amusement

4. Art is not Magic

5. Art as Imaginative Expression of Emotions

5a. Expression as Exploration of our Emotions

5b. Imagination as the Space Between Sensations and Ideas

5c. Intellectual Emotions

5d. Imagination, Consciousness, and Art

6. Art as Language: How Much Of Expression Can be Artistic?

7. All Social Interaction as the Expression of Emotions

Part II: The Use of Art: Emotional Expression for the Artist and the Community

1. Art, Knowledge of Experience, and Empathy

2. Knowledge of Self and Knowledge of Others: That Artist's Universal Expression as Enabling Empathy

3. Language and Reenactment: How Does Language Work?

4. Reenactment and Empathy: What Does This Have to do With Empathy?

5. The Artist and The Audience: How Does Individual Expression Relate to the Audience?

6.

The Artist's Empathy With His Audience: Expressing The Quality of Contemporary Experience

7.

Art and the Means to a Universal Understanding/Reenactment of the Present: What Is The Universal Thing That The Artist Tries to Communicate?

8. John Searle's Status Functions and Specifying the Universality of the Artist's Expression: Understanding the Structure of Language as Understanding the Task of the Artist

Part III: Becoming the Everyday Artist: Integrating Imaginative Emotional Expression into Daily Life

1. Language and Social Life: All of Life As Art

2. Applying Artistic Expression to Daily Life: Waiting for Moment's to Express Underlying Structures of Life

3. Applying Artistic Expression as Modifying the Content of Action

4. The Constant Project of Studying and Constructing Yourself

5. Foucault's Aesthetics of Existence

Part IV: The Artist as Cultural Insurgent

1. Amusement and the Dulling of Empathy: Combating Amusement

2. Foucault as Artist: His 'Autobiographical' Monographs as Imaginative Expressions of Emotion

3. Language and the Rutting of Thought: Impediments to Creativity

Part V: Spreading the Insurrection

1. The Audience's Empathy

2. The Will to Empathy: Fostering Daily Creativity Through Artistic Work

3. The Artist as Supplying t

he Audience

the Means to Express Their Own Creativity

4. Copyright Law and Creativity: David Shields

I really feel very unsure about how all of this is going to come together. About how it is going to flow as a unified piece of writing. But here goes nothing. I guess I'll keep working on it.

Oh and here is a note about one hour after I originally wrote this. I've decided that I am going to have to do what I did for my Society's Implicit War essays. I'm going to have to flip through The Principles of Art page by page, read all the things I noted and underlined, and pull all the quotations I want. I'll then plug them into my outline in the working piece.

I was thinking for a little while that I could perhaps just sit down and write this thing. That I wouldn't need to pull lots of quotations. But as soon as I started skimming the book I realized how rich my understanding of the book would become if I really took the time to do that. If I really take the time to skim and reread I think I'll be able to do something a lot better. So. The skimming begins. Yikes.

Some Notes For Next Essay: Collingwood, Searle, Language, and the Art of Life

So my time has been mostly occupied by work. But on the bus I have been making steady progress on Collingwood's The Principles of Art, and I can't believe how fruitful it is proving to be. Collingwood is handling some of the most fascinating questions and posing some very compelling and exciting answers. I'm so tired it is hard for me to even begin to think about it all.

But generally i am pleased because he just explicitly told me that all of our gestures, actions, and words could become a form of art. Which is precisely what I wanted him to say. My last major essay 'The Science and Art of Minds' probed that question, and I'm so happy to have Collingwood on my side with this idea that life itself can be an art form. I so badly want to find ways to be creative in my own life, and sometimes feel that my writing isn't satisfying enough. I want to find ways to explain how all life and decision making can be creative, how empathy and compassion can be creative. So on and so on and so on. Just like I wrote in that post called 'On Creativity', I want it all so badly. I want that artistic spirit.

I want words like fire.

I want life to be like flaming language.

I just mean that if every gesture can be language, as Collingwood says, then I want all my movements and actions to be powerful and expressive language. This is basically what I wrote about in my essay called "Social Progress and Personal Progress: Expanding the Unconscious Repertoire and Densifying the Content of Action." I want every action to be artistic and expressive. Every single action.

Impossible.

But I want this passion to be my goal. I want me to push myself to be constantly creative. Every word. Like I said, impossible.

Collingwood is making me so hyper aware about emotions and their expression. How exactly they interact with the intellect. What it is that the imagination is.

It is absolutely fascinating what Collingwood is doing in The Principles of Art. I can't even believe it.

But I generally am very interested with his idea about the imagination as a intermediary between emotions and the intellect. Imagination is the space where our emotions have been consciously recognized, but have not yet been fully intellectualized. We are able to imagine and hold sensation in place, but are not yet fully intellectualizing them, abstracting them. Art is the imaginative expression of our emotions. Not the intellectual expression, but the imaginative expression. And no, I don't fully grasp this distinction yet. I have so much work left to do with Collingwood.

Collingwood also says that all art is language. But that language is a much more general phenomena than just words and speech. Bodily movement is language. Every gesture is language. I find it interesting because Marco Iacoboni, the UCLA neuroscientist, also claims that language is fundamentally connected to hand movements. So I think Collingwood has a surprisingly contemporary view on what language really is all about.

I am also curious about how Collingwood talks about what the artist expresses is what everyone else already knows or feels. Sorta. He said, I think, that the artists job is to articulate the experience that he/she is going through, but that he is thus trying to remind other people in society what they are experiencing. The artists can become a voice for society, or something.

But let me just say what one of my main questions is right now with this work: if the artist is essentially using language to imaginatively express his emotions, and he is expressing a common sort of social experience, then how does John Searle's work in Making The Social World relate?

John Searle believes that all of human social and institutional reality can be explained by language's ability to bring certain realities into existence. Searle discusses 'status functions', meaning things that function in our own society only because people regard them as functioning in that way. Their status is the only thing that allows them to function in society. A great example is money. It has no real value. But everyone regards it as having value so we can trade with it. But one of the main things is that people don't have to be consciously aware of status functions in order for them to work.

Searle believes that most social/institutional reality is brought into being by 'status function declarations'. That when we declare something to be the case it thus becomes the case. When we say 'this is money' or 'this fence signifies the boundary of my property', we are literally bringing those things into existence. We are not discovering the fact that money has value, or that our property extends so far, we are literally making those things socially real by declaring them to be so. Thus, Searle claims that the status function declaration is responsible for the creation of all human institutional and social reality. What a huge claim, right? I find it somewhat compelling though.

So, my question is this: given Collingwood's concern with language, and his idea about how the artist expresses a common experience of the people in society, is it possible that what the artist is expressing is his feelings about the status function declarations that are framing his experience in society? Is the artist perhaps the person who discovers how his emotions are structured by his surrounding social environment, which is constituted by status function declarations?

My inkling at this point is that these questions are inadequate. I haven't yet finished The Principles of Art. I have about 50 pages left. I know that there is a relationship between what Collingwood is saying and what Searle said that needs to be articulated. But I can't do it yet. But given what Collingwood says about language, and the artist's relationship to society, it seems undoubted that Searle's work on the structure of human civilization has to have some implications for Collingwood's theory of art, which extends far into life.

Another thing: I think that Searle's work definitely has huge implications for what I have written about as 'The Genealogy of the Modern Mind'. Basically, if I am talking about how a theory of mind needs to be constructed in light of social/historical knowledge, then wouldn't this notion of status function declarations be useful in articulating precisely what sort of social information needs to be taken into account in order to construct a genealogical theory of mind? If I am saying that we need to think about how history structures minds, then doesn't this idea of status function declarations let us understand exactly what the structure of minds is? I think so. Very curious. Searle will likely be of great use to me.

Jesus. I sure do have a lot of weird ideas right now that I can't track down very clearly. My thinking is evolving in weird directions right now. Very exciting directions.

Calm it down now. That was a freestyle. Just wait til I sit my ass down and really write it. LOL just a little R. Kelly there. I was listening to that part of a song and it seemed appropriate.

When I really get around to studying and writing this stuff it will be great. But right now these are all vague connections that I am starting to see bubble up. I'll articulate them in the next few weeks hopefully.

I cannot wait to see how Collingwood wraps up The Principles of Art. Hot.

The Challenge of Being Mindful About Thoughts of the Past and Future

This post feels very interesting to me and I've been thinking about this for a good while now. Lazily, day-dreamily, casually, I've been thinking about it. Mindfulness has become an increasingly important theme for me. The importance of paying attention has been reaffirmed for me by many disciplines. Buddhism, neuroplasticity, history, planning, living. All of it seems to revolve around this idea of mindfulness, of paying attention to the present moment and my experiences in the present moment. Paying attention paying attention paying attention. Being in the present moment with an awareness of yourself, your thoughts, your feelings, and your experiences.

This idea of being grounded in the present moment, however, seems to become a challenge when I think about time. How is it that I can be mindful and still study history? History requires me by its very nature to think of the past, to remove myself from the present moment, so how can I do both? How is it that I can plan for the future and still be mindful? Planning is inevitable, I have to plan for the future, I have to push myself to imagine the future, so how do I be mindful about that? How do I reconcile the idea of being grounded in the present with the fact that thinking about the past and the future is inevitable and necessary?

Interestingly, I think that simulation theory of mind actually provides an answer, or the inklings of an answer. The basic idea is that even though we are thinking about the past and the future, it is still something that is happening in the present moment, and therefore something that we can still be mindful about. In some ways I feel like I am picking up on my post of 4/6/10 called 'Planning and Remembering: Imagining the Self in Different Times and False Memories'. So I will be referring to these processes as planning and remembering. But right now my goal is to reconcile the need for planning and remembering with my interest in mindfulness. My hope is to reconcile mindfulness and planning/remembering by specifying that these processes of planning and remembering are simulative, and thus clarifying that they are defined by their place in the present moment, and are thus subject to mindfulness. So let me move on to their simulative nature in general.

Thoughts of Other Times as Contemporary Simulations

Well first I would like to talk about memory as a process of mental simulation of the past. My stance is very much influenced by R.G. Collingwood's philosophy of history. Since memory is essentially a sort of personal history that is accomplished only from experience, I think it resembles historical thinking enough to make Collingwood relevant.

So Collingwood believes that historical thinking is something that always happens in the present moment. Even though we are thinking of the past, trying to remember the past, it is still something that is happening in the present moment. This is what led Collingwood to conclude that all history is the reenactment of past thought in the mind of the historian. He discusses Croce and his claim that all history is 'contemporary history'. History, above all, is a way of thinking, and the crucial point is that it always happens in the present moment. When we think of the past we are simply attempting to recreate those thoughts now. So historical thinking is still an exercise in present thought, a contemporary mental exercise.

The parallel to memory is fairly obvious to me. If we are remembering something, if were are trying to relive an old moment or thought, we are not actually going to that time. We are simply rethinking those thoughts or experiences right now, in the contemporary. Steven Rose, a neuroscientist, claimed that memory was an active and simulative process. I believe Alvin Goldman says something similar? I forget. But in any case, Rose says that anytime we have a memory we actively recreate it. We do not just passively explore the past through memory, we actively build a narrative of the past. Every time we have a memory we change it, we make it different. This is because memory, just like historical thinking, is always a contemporary process. It is always happening right now, in the present. Just because it is thought of the past it is still thought that takes place in the present. Memory will always take place in the present, will always be colored by our present frame of mind, and is thus always happening right now.

Now I believe that this can also be extended to planning and thoughts of the future. Although our thoughts are of the future, we are trying to plan or anticipate the future, it is also a contemporary exercise. Our mind is still working in the present moment to try and anticipate the future. It is merely a hypothetical simulation of a possible future. So it is still, therefore, contemporary. It is still happening in the present moment.

By clarifying that both remembering and planning are simulative exercises that resemble Collingwood and Croce's ideas I can now reconcile them with mindfulness. In order to be mindful about thoughts of the past and future I simply need to recognize their contemporary nature. Even though my mind is in a sense 'extending itself into different times' it is in reality always located in the present. So it is quite alright that my mind naturally drifts towards the past and the future, it is fine that I think temporally like this. But I just have to remember that they are still happening right now. I can be mindful about these things, I can still pay attention to them, just so long as I recognize that they are right here in the present moment.

I am not quite sure how to articulate this conclusion more clearly. But for me this is enough for now. Remembering and planning will always be things that I do in the present moment. I simply need to recognize that they are simply contemporary simulations of an imagined past and an imagined future. Because they are contemporary they can therefore be observed mindfully. I can wonder why my present frame of mind is inclining me to remember or plan in these certain ways.

In conclusion, thinking of different times is indeed compatible with mindful observation of the present. I simply have to recognize that remembering and planning are contemporary exercises that are enacted as forms of simulation.

Original Notes of 6/20/10

Reflect on your post on planning and remembering. Thknk about how you have made decisions that involve flash imaginings of the past and future. Think about locking the door when ROb went out first. Think about parking closer to Rob so Efron could have a spot. Think about feeling the water bottle cap on your leg and imagining it falling based on a noise in the car. I had to make sense of the evidence (the sound), but the lid hand't fallen.

Think about Humphrey and the development of a cerebral feedback loop that accounts for time by projecting.

Hello August, Hello Baltimore

Well well well! Interesting weekend.

Had a very nice time with my parents in Farmville. Their new house is super nice it is hard to believe. Hopefully I should have some pictures of it on the internet soon. Cause it is this wild huge barn that has been renovated and turned into a wild nice house.

Apparently it was custom built by some people and then they split really fast and told it cheap. I had all these funny imaginings about why they could have possibly left this nice house so quickly. Probably some family emergency. But I had also considered that maybe it was aliens, or werewolves, or monsters, or something silly and fantastic like that. OMG I HOPE MY PARENTS DON'T GET EATEN BY MONSTERS. Lol, that would never happen, but I got a kick out of how my mind took me to those ideas.

All in all, looks like my parents are going to be able to have a very sound and comfortable retirement in Farmville. It was a good trip, I'll miss them. Felt a bit sad, but life is full speed ahead right now. This is movement. This is action. This is change. This is no longer childhood.

The trip was nice, I got some stuff done to take care of my car, which I will be selling later this week. Then on Saturday I'll be flying out west to California, and then onward to Seattle.

While I was there I read an essay by Hayden White called 'History, Historicism, and the Figurative Imagination'. For a long time I had read these essays by White and just couldn't get what he was trying to do. Finally I feel like I am beginning to understand. I think I now get what a 'tropological theory of discourse' would be, and what it would do. In fact, I have a post planned where I can explore these ideas.

In other post news, I am still working on my 'Society's Implicit War' posts, and I am also working on a post on the relationship between simulation theory of mind and tacit mental theory. Anyways, all is well. Better than that even. Things are full speed ahead.

Over and out.

New Post New Post Oh Boy

So my next substantial post that I am working is an analysis of Foucault's Discipline & Punish: The Birth of the Prison. My analysis of the book is going to revolve around my experience with military history. In particular, I am curious about what I am calling 'society's implicit war', ie all of the violent and coercive elements that are necessary to maintain social order, and how they don't really register on us with a regular basis. Prisons, militaries, police, all have become so ubiquitous that we don't find them troubling anymore.

But think about it, if we don't do certain things people will hurt us. Plain and simple.

Anyways, it is gonna be a monster. Here is a working outline/table of contents that I am working with. As I continue to skim the rest of the book the latter half of the outline may expand with more subsections – but right now I have quite a lot of structure to work with, it is going well. I am in the quote gathering phase. Skimming the whole book and placing quotes in appropriate sections. Then I will start the real writing. Maybe tomorrow. Either way.

Title: Society's Implicit War: Foucault's "Discipline & Punish" and Military History

Part I: Society’s Implicit War from Monarchy to Republic
1. Society's Implicit War: From Managing to Disguising Civilization's Necessary Violence

Monarchical Violence as War
a. The Original Purpose of Standing Armies
b. Torture and the Monarch’s War Against Domestic 'Enemy Troops'

The Shortcomings of Monarchical Violence
c. The Unpredictability of Physical Violence
d. Capitalism and the Need for a New Political Economy
e. Discipline as Emerging From Military Institutions

Prisons as War
f. Prisons and the Abstraction of Judicial Violence
g. The Idea of the Social Contract as Disguising the Implicit War
h. Politics as the Continuation of War by Other Means: Disciplinary Society as Waging an Implicit War

2. The Monarch's Violence and the Government's Discipline: Truth, Power/Knowledge, and Strategies in Torture and Prison

The Corporeal Strategy of Torture
a. The Logic of Torture
b. Torture and the Production of Truth
c. The Centrality of the Body in Both Torture and Discipline

The Representative Strategy of Discipline
d. Discipline and the Production of Truth About Bodies: Power/Knowledge
e. Disciplinary Society’s Open-Strategies: The Worker Ants and the Big Picture
f. Criminals as Integral to Society’s Open-Strategies

Part II: Simulational Mindreading and Control in Torture and Discipline

3. Observation and Simulational Mindreading in Relations of Power/Knowledge
a. Power/Knowledge: Social Understanding and Simulation in Relations With Others in General
b. Power/Knowledge and Simulational Mindreading: Torture and Prisons as Enabling Different Ways of Simulating Other People's Thoughts
c. Observation of Torture and Simulational Mindreading
d. Observation and Simulational Mindreading in Disciplinary Society

4. From Low-level to High-level Mindreading: From The Spectacle of Torture to The Constant Observation of the Panopticon
a. Torture as Mirror and Resonance Based Mindreading
b. The Panopticon as Enabling Abstract and High-Level Mindreading
c. Panoptic Mindreading for Prisoners and Civilians: Structuring Incarceration and its Representation
d. Observation and Controlling Prisoners Through High-Level Mindreading
e. Abstract Penal Representation and Controlling the Population With High-Level Mindreading

Part III: The Pragmatics: Being A Guerilla of Power/Knowledge

5. Politics as the Continuation of War by Other Means and the 'Politics of Ourselves'
a. Disciplinary Society's Power/Knowledge and our Identity
b.War and Ethics
c. Practices of the Self as a War

6. Intellectual Insurrection: Waging Mental War
a. Histories of the Present as Tools for Battle
b. Freedom Within Open-Strategies
c. Meta-Strategic Thinking
d. The Neural War

Lets Make It Ice

Ice Like Fire.

Either way I just wanted to type rapidly for a minute.

My last post was an interesting exercise. Got me to talk about somethings that I really like to think about.

My next post, however, seems even crazier and more interesting to me.

The title: "Society's Implicit War: Foucault's Discipline & Punish and Military History"

I have about 4 pages so far and the outline is looking pretty potent. So I feel good about it.

I'm supposed to go to work at 2:30 and don't feel like it. Probably will just end up going.

But I would rather get other things done today. My parents move in exactly two weeks from today. So I need to get down to business and get all my stuff together so I can get ready to move. Word. Well.

Whatever, get ready for a big post on military history.

And get ready for me to take a break from blogging so that I can move across the country?

Planning and Remembering: Imagining the Self in Different Times and False Memories

So, recently something happened to me, and in this moment the line between imagination, planning/forethought/intention, and memory disappeared and I realized they all belong to one strange imagined universe. It felt like planning and remembering had swirled together into the pool of the imagination. So first, the story. Second, the jabber.

The story. I was at my house with two friends. My friend was missing something that he thought he had brought with him. He recounted the days events, explaining how he remembers sitting on a chair with the item next to him and thinking 'i am gonna put that into my back pack.' And he really felt as if though he had placed it in there. He was genuinely surprised it wasn't there.

How could this happen? How could he have the intention of doing something, fail to do it, and have a false memory of doing it anyways?

Short answer: both forethought/intention and memory operate using the same processes of imagination and simulation. Intentions we have considered, therefore, can provide us with false memories. And when we incorrectly remember a memory we are drawing on the parts of our imagination that were primed by our planning.

Now, to expand this idea I want to talk about three things, all of them relating to how the mind engages in processes of imagination and internal simulation. I'll talk about how the mind internally simulates with the imagination in general. Then how the brain may engage in simulation in processes of forethought or planning. Then I'll talk about how the brain engages in processes of simulation when remembering things. Last, I'll try to wrap up how imagination, planning, and memory are all very closely related in the mind/brain.

General Imagination and Simulation:

So in this section I want to flesh out how it is that imaginative thinking typically involves forms of internal simulation. I am positing this mainly on my understanding of mirror neurons, and also on my sense of how imagination is wrapped up with experience. So, mirror neurons. When we see someone in pain, a portion of our brain cells responsible for feeling pain is activated, those are mirror neurons. Similarly, when we witness any action being performed our brain activates part of the neurons required to perform that action. When we hear a sound our brain mirrors the neurons responsible for the action the sound produced. For example, if we hear the sound of a baseball bat hitting a baseball, our brain would activate the neurons responsible for swinging a baseball bat. So, basic idea propping up the remainder of the post: the witnessing of an actions causes us to internally simulate the performance of that action for ourselves. In short, perception requires internal simulation.

Now, I have read that mirror neurons also play a role in all imagining. When we think about a hypothetical situation, our brain is utilizing its past experiences and its mirror neurons to concoct that imagined scenario. So we use our experiences with pain, our experiences with sadness, or frustration, to imagine how someone would have felt in x y or z situation. When we think of someone on the side of the road with a smoking car we have to imagine how that person feels, and we can only do that by drawing on our own experiences in that situation, or our knowledge of other people's experiences. I can't remember if I explicitly read about this, or if I am paraphrasing lots of stuff or what. But I am fairly sure that mirror neurons are involved in the imagination, and so therefore anytime we use the imagination we are engaging in some form internal simulation of past experience.

So, base assertion for the next two sections: Every time we use our imagination, from the mundane to the fantastic, we are engaging in some sort of internal simulation. We always using our past experiences to create a sense of how it would feel to do a certain thing, or to be in a certain situation. When we are thinking about the past, present, or future, or interacting with others, we are in some sense imagining and also internally simulating.

Onto forethought/planning and memory as forms of simulation.

Planning and Imaginative Simulation:

In this section I am entertaining the idea that forethought and planning require you to use the imagination in a way that amounts to a simulation of a hypothetical experience. For example, when I am planning to wake up and walk my dog, or pick up something for someone, I bet part of my mind is simulating those actions internally. When I see someone else experience pain, my mind activates pain receptors. Similarly, I bet that when I imagine myself getting in a car accident, or imagine myself going to the store, my mind activates all the motor and emotional neurons that would be involved in those actions. So imagining the future, planning, would probably force me to simulate the experiences that I suspect I will have in the future. So planning and the imagination and simulation seem to be very closely related.

I just read, in The Mind and The Brain, about an experiment comparing brains that actually perform a task and a group that imagines themselves performing the same task. I don't want to go into the details of this experiment. But, they had a group play a specific song on the piano and another group imagine themselves playing a specific song on the piano. Basically, the same areas of the brain were affected in near identical ways. Imagining an action and performing an action utilize the same areas and causes similar change.

So, this legitimates the idea that imagining the future probably involves the activation of areas of the brain that would be required for enacting those plans, and, as I will discuss, are also used when remembering the event. Planning amounts to an imaginative simulation of hypothetical future experience.

Now I want to make the case that memory also involves a form of imaginative simulation, and then I will talk about how planning and memory may mingle and become confused in certain moments, creating false memories

Memory and Imaginative Simulation:

So, as I said, I want to claim that memory is also a process that involves the imagination, and that it too involves the activation of neurons that were involved in the actual experience. In short, that memory is a form of imaginative simulation. I am basing this off of a little bit of evidence and some speculation. I saw Steven Rose, a neurobiologist, at a conference on neuroplasticity that I saw a video of, say that when remember something we are actively reconstructing the memory every time. Further, every time we think of the same memory and bring it back to life and we inevitably change it each time we bring it back. This makes it seem as though memory almost definitely involves the imagination. More so, it shows, as we all know, that memory is not very reliable, and is more of a story that your mind creates for you than anything else. So, memory definitely involves the imagination, whether it is mostly the a priori imagination or not, I haven't worked out that detail. But it is probably a combo of a priori and deliberate imagination, more so a priori I think.

Second, mirror neurons are involved in memory. When we remember past actions, just as when we perceive present actions, or imagine future actions, our brain activates the parts of our brain that would be necessary for performing those actions. So, when we are having a memory, we are in essence re-experiencing those moments as they have been created/warped by our imagination. Memory, therefore, is a process that involves the imagination and simulation of past events.

Now, to discuss how, given that planning and memory both utilize the same forms of imagination and simulation, they can become blurred in certain moments and create false memories.

When planning collapses into false memory:

I am arguing that in terms of the parts of the brain utilized, there is significant overlap between planning and remembering. The central faculties for both are 1. the imagination and 2. mirror neurons. When we are planning to do something we imagine ourselves performing that action in the future. When we imagine this action our mirror neurons that correspond with the performance of that action are activated (we plan to play baseball, our motor neurons for swinging, catching, etc. are activated). So planning forces us to imagine and internally simulate the experience we intend to enact. Similarly, with memory, we imagine something we did in the past, and our corresponding mirror neurons are activated (we remember pain, our pain neurons fire). So, memory, too, is essentially a form of imagination that facilitates an internal simulation. The only difference between imaginative simulation in planning and memory is the point in time we are imagining/simulating, and why we are doing it. We are either imagining/simulating hypothetical future experience for the purpose of planning, or we are imagining/simulating past experience for the purpose of remembering.

So, given that planning and remembering are using the same parts of the mind/brain, how could they blur? Well, I think I have a reasonable explanation for why it is that my friend, and maybe others, have false memories sometimes.

My friend had planned to bring his item with him. When he looked into his bag and it wasn't there he could have sworn he had a memory of putting it in there. I am proposing that his act of planning to do it (i.e. imagining/simulating the act of putting the item in his bag), 'primed' all of those neurons to fire when it came time to construct a memory. When we use one specific set of neurons (like when he imagines/simulates the specific task of putting the item in his bag), we make those neruons more likely to fire at a later date. This is called priming. When we learn about something new, we are more likely to find that thing in the world around us, even if it is just as common as before. The brain has become primed to its presence. It works the same way with language and memory.

So, my friends false memory can be attributed to the priming that occurred in his brain from the planning of the action. When he imagined/simulated putting the item in the bag he used all the motor neurons necessary for performing the action, the same motor neurons that would be used in the memory of the action. So when he tried to remember what happened, why the item wasn't there, his motor neurons were primed, from the planning, to fire, giving him the false memory of himself putting them in the bag. So planning primes the mirror neurons in the brain, thus making them more likely to fire when they are called upon for memory.

I created a sloppy pictorial image of this idea.

What I am trying showing here is the central pillar of the imagination, and how it is that planning and remembering can both be considered forms of imagination/simulation that are projected into different times. With planning, however, it can create ripples that extend into our sense of memory. When we plan an action we activate all the specific neurons (via mirror neurons) that are required to perform that action. When we remember an action, we do the exact same thing, we activate the mirror neurons that we believe we used in the actual moment. Given that neurons become primed once used, wouldn't the imagination of an action or outcome prime those neurons and make us more likely to remember the event that way afterwards? If you plan to act a certain way in a situation, are you more likely to remember that event as if you acted that way? If I plan on acting confident and witty at a party, and I imagine/simulate myself as acting that way, would my memory be more likely to be constructed around those terms? Would I be more likely to remember myself as witty or confident?

Here I feel like I am breaking ground on things that I am only aware of now that I have finished writing this. The connection, very generally, between intention/planning and our memories. Do our memories often drift around what our intentions were? Do we remember things certain ways because we planned them to go that way? All of this stuff on mirror neurons and the imagination certainly suggests our minds understand mainly through imagination and simulation of intention. So, it makes sense that imagining intention, planning, priming those mirror neurons, would make us more inclined to remember things as we had planned or intended them to be.

The imagination, as a super broad concept, is quickly becoming an important idea for me.