DARPA's In Ur Brainz, Hacking Ur Storiez.

The first quantum computer was bought this year by Lougheed Martin.

venturebeat.com...

And also, generally,

One of the great tricks that we seem to have up our collective sleeve appears to be the ability to take in new stories and narratives, do the whole thing where we neurobiologically join with the characters, and then do what we want with them.

That's where the magic comes in, and it seems to illustrate one of our greatest strengths. Maybe we take in the stories like nutrition of some sort. And anything that gets in that is potentially harmful is surrounded by, maybe say, Narrato-Phages. And the Narrato-Phages allow us to transmute possibly harmful memes into redemptive narrative.

Think Voodoo or Tobriand Island Cricket.

Or maybe not so redemptive if a particular society is stuck on a death trip or something.

The 'Softies' have spoken.

reply to post by Frater210


Niven, Pournelle, and Heinlein, were my three best friends in high school along with a select few others like Orson Scott Card, Allan Dean Foster, and a whole host of more classic fiction and horror writers such as Melville, Lovecraft, Poe etc etc... Clarke I could never read. I just couldn't finish his books no matter how many times I tried. Attribute it to bad taste or no attention span as you would...

Either way I clearly see the influence of these writers on modern society and technology. Is this just them being able to take a pattern out to it's logical conclusion and merely reporting? Or is this further proof of concept that the stories shape human consciousness and thus reality?

I'm also from back in highschool a gamer nerd. There is (was) a rich world created by a British Company called Games Workshop that took place 40K years in the future (lots and lots of neat concepts and fun worlds poorly executed and it only got worse with each incarnation). One of the neat concepts was that Orks in this world have all sorts of crazy technology that shouldn't work and essentially it only works because they believe it will and no other race can get their junk to work. This idea leads me to wonder if we reality only functions the way it does because we think it will behave that way.

If this is the case than being able to control the masses beliefs and consciousness through story could lead to far more than we have even imagined...

Yeah yeah I like to get carried away I know but what if?

reply to post by Jinglelord


God, I love 40K...

One of the neat concepts was that Orks in this world have all sorts of crazy technology that shouldn't work and essentially it only works because they believe it will and no other race can get their junk to work. This idea leads me to wonder if we reality only functions the way it does because we think it will behave that way.

I have some experience with that. When I was 21 I had a '74 Toyota FJ40 Landcruiser. No one could start it but me. This was a problem as I would park the thing and then split and someone would have to move it. It looked like something an Orc would drive. Anyway, I have had anecdotal experiences with technology like that.

I think that is what Socrates and Plato and the sort were trying to get us to do by using the dialectic. That we could come to some consensus of the truth, or close to it, by narrowing down what is 'true' and 'not true'. The cool thing about the dialectic and what this thread discusses is that it takes two, or more I suppose, to sit down and talk it out through the method of the dialectic. maybe it could be seen as a joint narrative that the two dialecticians develop as they try to move towards 'truth'. They hold up their story to the light to see if it survives. If it doesn't it is tossed out and the two look for a better way to tell the story.

Best part is, we do it together. I know it would seem that one could do it alone but it would really be the best example of mental masturbation. Ideas, narratives, need to be taken out and test driven to see if they survive. Can't do that if they never get out of the garage.


So, yeah, I like the way you think, as usual, JingleLord.



Linkages:
en.wikipedia.org...

en.wikipedia.org...

reply to post by Frater210


Ah ha and this is your story.

I have a similar story: had a 78 Z28 Camero that nobody else could drive. This thing would cut, scrape, burn and otherwise run like crud if at all for anyone but me. I could beat cars off the line that I shouldn't have been able to given the performance most people got out of these cars. But I believed it was the fastest and most evil thing on the streets. When I thought it would break it did, when I called it a piece of crap it ran like crap, and I have herd similar stories again and gain. Have our stories given our vehicles souls?

I suspect we can build a huge body of evidence that shows our reactions to good stories that shape our beliefs can actually shape our realities.

If this can be the case here are the implications

1: The human brain is equipped to affect the reality in which it exists outside of purely subjective ways.
2: The subconscious mind facilitates this shaping based upon what is expected.
3: Expectations are formed by the stories we hear throughout our lives about how reality should work.
4: That which controls the stories controls reality...

I realize this takes many assumptions and leaps of faith but isn't it what we're all kind of thinking without wanting to sound batty and actually say?

Oh, yeah, I am pretty sure this is all going to end up in a study of Witchcraft.

There is a good reason why the richest veins of information to be found in any culture, from an Anthropological and Sociological perspective, are to be found in that society's relationship with what is ultimately, Witchcraft.

It is believed that around half of all of our communication is made up of body language and non-verbal cues. A witch might be thought of as a hacker that is able to penetrate that firewall with semiotic precision and insert, by will and talent, a new emotional introject that can jar one's, or several's, narrative in one way or another.

So that's a freebie from me to you, DARPA, if you are hanging around.

I suppose I could be more clear. See, if society tells you that someone (a witch) can fashion your likeness from wax and put pins in it and place it in your walls somehow which will bring about sickness and death, then if you find something like that laying around the house, well, trouble will ensue.

Or if your milk goes sour and society tells you it is a witch; yer gonna be painting hex marks on your barn.

Or if your cattle starts to die, and you live in sub-Saharan Africa, and your people believe that anyone can be a witch and that the witch mark is an undetectable black spot on the witch's liver? And lets say you have a cousin that is owed cattle from that other cousin that is a little funny. And let's say that first cousin is particularly willful and talented, well you might find yourself tempted to examine that other cousin's liver up close and personal, in the flesh, so to speak.

Don't think these primitive examples are not applicable to we. They are.

Happens every day.

Originally posted by timewalker
reply to post by Jinglelord

 

Just look on the streets. Truth is stranger than fiction, or is it? I'm afraid were actually too late.

Occupy's V for Vendetta protest mask is a symbol of festive citizenship

This is the face of protest in 2011. At Occupy demonstrations from Wall Street to St Paul's people choose to wear the same mask, an eerie phantom face of a diabolical musketeer, a cheerfully sinister underground d'Artagnan. The mask started its revolutionary career as the public face of the Anonymous movement. All in all it marks a massive change of fortune for one of British history's greatest villains.

source

If I were DARPA, I'd use Anon as a case study.

It's the first example of a fictional narrative inspiring a political movement. Alan Moore fully struck paydirt. Millions of people identify intimately and passionately with the character of "V." They subsume their identity so completely into the narrative that they wear the icon's face.

And then they get political.

Their promotional efforts are Epic Stories.

Edit to add: Ain't Alan Moore a hermetic magician? *high-fives F210*

reply to post by Frater210


Seriously if you're ever looking for a co-author on a modern dialectic work hit me up. Brilliant!

Witchcraft can and will be the place where it ends and begins.

Once we know a little we begin to believe we are scientists deconstructing and reconstructing reality at our whim. Then we realize how much we don't know and create complex models to understand it. Then we begin to learn what we didn't know only to realize we need to know more up until the point where only quantum computers can know what our subconscious has figured out long ago.

Problem: Our conscious can't know as much as our subconscious so we look to computers to run the models our intuition has already sorted out.

Problem 2: Our computers aren't near where our brains are quite yet.

Problem 3: Once the computers have out paced our brains they will in essence be witchcraft figuring out things we can't possibly know but it works... just like witchcraft.

reply to post by mistermonculous

Edit to add: Ain't Alan Moore a hermetic magician? *high-fives F210*

Here we go again. How does it always seem to come back to this? Maybe it's just us, having created something more bizarre an inexplicable. JL

On his fortieth birthday in 1993, Moore openly declared his dedication to being a ceremonial magician, something he saw as "a logical end step to my career as a writer".

Moore associates magic very much with writing; "I believe that magic is art, and that art, whether that be music, writing, sculpture, or any other form, is literally magic. Art is, like magic, the science of manipulating symbols, words or images, to achieve changes in consciousness… Indeed to cast a spell is simply to spell, to manipulate words, to change people's consciousness, and this is why I believe that an artist or writer is the closest thing in the contemporary world to a shaman."

Connecting his esoteric beliefs with his career in writing, he conceptualised a hypothetical area known as the "Idea Space", describing it as "...a space in which mental events can be said to occur, an idea space which is perhaps universal. Our individual consciousnesses have access to this vast universal space, just as we have individual houses, but the street outside the front door belongs to everybody. It's almost as if ideas are pre-existing forms within this space… The landmasses that might exist in this mind space would be composed entirely of ideas, of concepts, that instead of continents and islands you might have large belief systems, philosophies, Marxism might be one, Judeo-Christian religions might make up another." He subsequently believed that to navigate this space, magical systems like the tarot and the Qabalah would have to be used.[37]

Taking up the study of the Qabalah and the writings of the notorious early 20th century occultist Aleister Crowley, Moore accepted Crowley's Thelemite ideas about True Will being connected to the will of the pantheistic universe.[37] In some of his earlier magical rituals, he utilised mind altering psychedelic drugs but later gave this up, believing that they were unnecessary, and stated, "It's frightening. You call out the names in this strange incomprehensible language, and you're looking into the glass and there appears to be this little man talking to you. It just works."

Wiki


V - Talk about a magic spell. Edit ~ He did V before his plunge into the hidden. Seems to work though.

We'll file Moore in *.shaminism

Dissonant narratives are hilarious. Outside the context of a war zone, anyway.

12. Avoid false jeopardy. Let's be honest.Sometimes you come to a break in the story where the clock indicates you have to create an act break, but there doesn't seem to be any handy jeopardy around which to structure a break. Some writers just say "Screw it" and have somebody walk through the door with a gun, however illogical that action might be. Others stop, backtrack, and try to find a thread in the story that can be either moved up or moved back to provide an act curtain. And some fudge it. False jeopardy. Not a good thing.

from "The Complete Book of Scriptwriting" By J. Michael Straczynski.

In 1965, President Johnson commented privately: "For all I know, our Navy was shooting at whales out there." [33] In 1981, Captain Herrick and journalist Robert Scheer re-examined Herrick's ship's log and determined that the first torpedo report from August 4, which Herrick had maintained had occurred—the "apparent ambush"—was in fact unfounded.[20] ...Stockdale wrote in his 1984 book Love and War: "[I] had the best seat in the house to watch that event, and our destroyers were just shooting at phantom targets—there were no PT boats there... There was nothing there but black water and American fire power." [34] Stockdale said his superiors ordered him to keep quiet about this. After he was captured, this knowledge became a heavy burden. He later said he was concerned that his captors would eventually force him to reveal what he knew about the second incident.] A taped conversation of a meeting several weeks after passage of the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution was released in 2001, revealing that McNamara expressed doubts to President Johnson that the attack had even occurred.[citation needed] In the Fall of 1999, retired senior CIA engineering executive S. Eugene Poteat wrote that he was asked in early August 1964 to determine if the radar operator's report showed a real torpedo boat attack or an imagined one. He asked for further details on time, weather and surface conditions... In the end he concluded that there were no torpedo boats on the night in question, and that the White House was interested only in confirmation of an attack, not that there was no such attack... The former Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara admitted that the Gulf of Tonkin incident never happened.

from en.wikipedia.org...

Another heads up to DARPA here.

reply to post by mistermonculous


Deux-ex-Machina.

Can't end your play? Have God descend on a chair from the ceiling and reconcile it all.

(I wouldn't want to suggest that a number of religions that are being played out on the Globe utilize Deux-ex-Mahina.)

reply to post by Jinglelord

This idea leads me to wonder if we reality only functions the way it does because we think it will behave that way.

Hey, JL,

I thought that I would add that you really know how to pick the tough ones. I think some Buddhists of differing stripes have actually tested the theory with hysterical results. 'The Princess and her missing head' story comes to mind.

reply to post by Frater210


I don't know that particular story but it must be good.

I generally drive my wife, friends, family, and co-workers to look at me oddly and wonder if I'm sane because I will take a line of inquiry out to the place where people just aren't comfortable being.

I figure if you're going to wonder about stuff you may as well wonder about the stuff behind the stuff and why that stuff is even there and what it does.

When you really get down to brass tacks you soon realize you have discovered something far far more interesting and complex than the fabric they were meant to hold in place...

reply to post by Aeons

(I wouldn't want to suggest that a number of religions that are being played out on the Globe utilize Deux-ex-Mahina.)

Oh come on, why not?

You have chosen a turn of phrase that is so closely connected to the ideas on this thread. 'The god from the (a) machine'. The God solves all problems in a way that is found agreeable to all, it satisfies the need for doxa, a commonality of thought and common sensibility of action. Yet the machine is made by man, not God. We sure are tricky, pulling that trick on ourselves.

What does it mean anyway, that we have to use that device? is it that Hunter Thompson quote? Is that why we do it?...

"Most smart people tend to feel queasy when the conversation turns to things like 'certain death' and 'total failure' and the idea of a 'doomed generation,'"

"But not me, I am comfortable with these themes.... Any conversation that can make smart people confront a mix of Death, Doom and Failure with a straight face is probably worth listening in on"

www.english.upenn.edu...

He and I have been in agreement on that for many, many years.

If this can be the case here are the implications

1: The human brain is equipped to affect the reality in which it exists outside of purely subjective ways.
2: The subconscious mind facilitates this shaping based upon what is expected.
3: Expectations are formed by the stories we hear throughout our lives about how reality should work.
4: That which controls the stories controls reality...

I realize this takes many assumptions and leaps of faith but isn't it what we're all kind of thinking without wanting to sound batty and actually say?

Yeah, I didn't want to spook our wonderful empiricists off.

But.

Since you pulled that weird, hairless cat out of the box, I've got to say I notice a satisfying symmetry between my thoughts on time and yours on narrative.

The process by which the sea of time is pinched into the course of linear event is a neurological one. We perform these dice rolls constantly at a quantum level. We do it collectively, and the inertia generated by the last choice we made will load the dice. Time as an autonomic function.

I guess another name for the inertia that restricts the possibilities we select from is narrative.

So that gives us super powers, right? Hell no. Instead of shaping a cete of flying badgers from the raw aethyr and and having an all-badger airshow over a major urban center, we wake up in the morning and shuffle around and maybe have some toast. Because these processes are unbelievably quick, involuntary, and collective.

Must actually work.

But love hairless cat and flying large rats. Will remain amused for hours.

Originally posted by mistermonculous

Since you pulled that weird, hairless cat out of the box,

I think I ruptured something laughing at that.

So that gives us super powers, right? Hell no. Instead of shaping a cete of flying badgers from the raw aethyr and and having an all-badger airshow over a major urban center, we wake up in the morning and shuffle around and maybe have some toast. Because these processes are unbelievably quick, involuntary, and collective.

edit on 10-11-2011 by mistermonculous because: Herd->cete.

I'm not so sure we couldn't get ourselves an all badger airshow. What might need to happen would be get our conscious thinking and our subconscious thinking a bit more in line with each other. It might break reality though and cause some sort of cosmic reset to occur.

I heard some guy on Coast to coast last week talking about multiple dimensions and a few things clicked in my head. He was talking about how he thinks there are 10 dimensions I frankly don't recall the 10th nor do I much care because the interesting part to me were just 9 of them. 3 Spacial dimensions we commonly accept, the neat part is 3 time dimensions, and 3 dimensions of consciousness, Of the latter two I speculate we only see one dimension of each, the point in time and the point of consciousness where we focus.

So what are the dimensions of consciousness and time we don't perceive? I don't know but it feeds in perfectly with the narrative (consciousness) and time. So to understand we can use our knowledge of spacial dimensions as an allegory for how this might work I would think...

I just had a brain cramp...

reply to post by mistermonculous

So it is all about tweaking templates, with the aim being to illict the same affective response from those segmented groups. Playing to their differences to leverage their commonality. Do you think its valid to say we can understand the potential military applications by understanding marketing theory?

You’re forgetting something. This doesn’t actually work.

Human beings are not so predictable.

reply to post by Frater210

I’m sorry. I cannot make head or tail of what you’re talking about, though it seems you’re calling me an old fogey. Old I may be, but I got out of advertising only five years ago.

Mass media advertising is a dying business. It’s dying along with the mass media. Bernays was one of the pioneers of public relations. His ideas were based on the social sciences and psychology of his time, which were witch-doctoring all right. The techniques he invented, like press releases and lobbying, are old hat nowadays.

Do you have any professional experience of advertising or mass communications?