The Power of the Spectacle

Humans interpret information at two basic levels, (1) the body-to-body affective stream which informs one subject of another subject's intentional state (via a sense of their "feelings"), and (2) a higher symbolic state, to which we apply ideas and concepts to make our "self" coherent to the other selves we interact with.

The higher state is a function of self-awareness: it is the witnessing function interacting with the "gestalt" of its bodily experienced and socially embedded pleasure in selfhood. This means symbolic awareness is fundamentally self-conscious. Indeed, language is just as much for the other person as it is for ourselves, yet we live in a society that acts as if this isn't in fact the case.

That you know what it feels like to do something, means that you are actually structuring your expected experience of self in terms of the feelings that emerge within your self-experience. The progression goes something like this for every adult Human: (1) experience driven neurological structure self-organizes to correlate with the meaning contained in a present environment (2) Consciousness experiences itself in a particular state; the body's priming corresponds to lower brainstem-amygdala dynamics; the reaction of consciousness corresponds to specific pre-frontal cortex wavelengths. Just as we experience ourselves consciously, so too is it modeled in the brain. (3) once symbolic-narrative processes get going, at which point this 'highest' level of emergent brain-activity - story telling - takes over and begins to regulate top-down all bodily processes.

Now, the body's dynamics are serially referenced to the intentional states of the people (and other creatures) around them - with a particularly powerful relationship to the behaviors of other Human beings. The "thicker" the relation - the harder it is to notice: like a fish in water or a bird in the air - neither of which possess any concept of the medium they exist within - the Human being is extraordinarily vulnerable to being structured in stereotypical ways by assuming a negative relationship to knowledge acquisition.

The hallmark of every demagogue is an anti-intellectualism that seeks to bait the insecurity of poorly educated people into fits of anger and rage against the "elitism" and "arrogance" of intellectuals who want to help them. Its a pretty clever trick - based upon a fundamental feature of human functioning: that the symbolic mind can dissociate the energetic background - its body - which is dynamically linked to everything else, and by doing so, "remove" the Human being from a consciousness of its fundamentally unitive existence with everything else. What's lost is rationality - coherence - and understanding.

Power of Spectacles

I think Donald Trump is helping me understand the religion of the elite.

The man is hilarious - and at the same time - horrifying. Tragedy and Comedy: those Greeks and intellectual forefathers of Rome, gave us more than knowledge: but its pathology.

Don't get me wrong, there is much good and salvageable in western civilization. Fantasy and unreality - the spectacle and imagination - exploration of future possibilities, interactions with obstacles - the typical story theme. All of this - at least to my taste, is awesome. Whats wrong is the extremism of it. We dislike radical Islamic extremism, but the west and its leader are just as extreme. Instead of the idea of "playing" with reality - notice the quotation marks - they full out PLAY WITH reality - as in, not acknowledging the actual effect they create, the horror and injustice they unleash, and the unfathomable amounts of suffering to which their agency remains existentially entangled with.

Why can't some people accept the difference between playing and reality - the title of Donald Winnicotts psychoanalytical thoughts. Spectacles are fine - as toys to play with. But the western elite goes further: they want to be completely identical with the toy - to let the toy play it, which has a quality of full-blown insanity to it - what Chris Hedges rightly calls the "pathology of the rich".

Play and Reality: people like this would like to present any criticism of their thinking as a criticism of play or fun. For them, the world is white and black, good and evil, their way or war: they can't see the knots of inner conflict which compels these extremist rages, shouts and screams. It has taken hundreds of years of psychology and brain science to recognize how insanely unstable these people are; granted, their is no real "self" who is to blame. The problem, what has happened - at least from my perspective - is simply nature 'working out' her kinks. Asymmetry split us, putting the wealthy and elite amongst us into a extreme model of the split itself: a hatred of non-elite Humans, both as a defense against unconscious guilt and a way to fortify the creation of a "myth of justification" - where positive feelings, joy, pleasure, etc, can be shared between like minds.

The spectacle reminds me of Noble Balls - in the late 1600's, 1700's, with their stupid and ridiculous wigs, their masquerades, and a life in pursuit of fame and fortune. I don't think the 'elite' is any different from me - although I think some of them might have an interesting neurological structure, inasmuch as experience shapes biology, and if the same experience is being environmentally recreated again and again, you can imagine what sort of difference might emerge between one class of Human and another class. It's quite interesting, as far as I know, that no neuroscientist has sought to quantify the structural differences between the brains of people of noble heritage, and non-noble people. No doubt it would have its funding cut.

Most Humans alive today are now being exposed to the spectacle of Trump. Right now were seeing the comedy of it. He's hilarious - hes so insecure and predictable in his responses. He's a thug with a mafia-like ethic, yet people don't see it yet because he's such a sly conman - a funny guy who mocks, plays dumb, and seeks non-stop to re-frame an issue through the force of his ego - an ego built around overwhelming the other person rather than using the delicacy of reason. He will also make other people laugh as he abuses you, which makes him so incredibly different - though effectively the same - from Hitler. Whereas Hitler was felt to be very serious in his convictions, Trump is all spectacle - all Human emotion - Homer Simpson writ large, but nevertheless a mind skilled in the complexities of deceiving other people.

But at a certain point, no doubt, our feelings - and the feelings of most people - will change for the worse. Nothing is more overwhelming to the Human nervous system than physical violence and death. It unleashes such horrific feelings that the common response is often suicide or a dissent into nihilism. People like this are already of the generation suffering with a sense of meaninglessness, and will have little options in the face of profound loss than to 'end' (as far as they know) their existential suffering, or forgo any care about reality because it is too painful to invest yourself in Others.

Not good options: the spectacle kills you, don't you know? Medusa's eyes will turn you to stone, leaving you caught on a "reified path" towards your eventual destruction.

a reply to: Astrocyte

I am not sure. I interpret info with a bias toward an infinite predictability effect.

a reply to: 3daysgone


Hurst Effect....

The Hurst effect plays an important role in many areas such as physics, climate and finance. It describes the anomalous growth of range and constrains the behavior and predictability of these systems. The Hurst effect is frequently taken to be synonymous with Long-Range Dependence (LRD) and is typically assumed to be produced by a stationary stochastic process which has infinite memory. However, infinite memory appears to be at odds with the Markovian nature of most physical laws while the stationary assumption lacks robustness. Here we use Lorenz's paradigmatic chaotic model to show that regime behavior can also cause the Hurst effect. By giving an alternative, parsimonious, explanation using non stationary Markovian dynamics, our results question the common belief that the Hurst effect necessarily implies a stationary infinite memory process. We also demonstrate that our results can explain atmospheric variability without the infinite memory previously thought necessary and are consistent with climate model simulations.

www.nature.com...

Lets begin...

An instanton[1] (or pseudoparticle[2][3]) is a notion appearing in theoretical and mathematical physics. An instanton is a classical solution to equations of motion[note 1] with a finite, non-zero action, either in quantum mechanics or in quantum field theory. More precisely, it is a solution to the equations of motion of the classical field theory on a Euclidean space-time.In such quantum theories, solutions to the equations of motion may be thought of as critical points of the action. The critical points of the action may be local maxima of the action, local minima, or saddle points. For example, the classical path (or classical equation of motion) is the path that minimizes the action and is therefore a global minimum. Instantons are important in quantum field theory because:they appear in the path integral as the leading quantum corrections to the classical behavior of a system, and they can be used to study the tunneling behavior in various systems such as a Yang–Mills theory.

en.wikipedia.org...

in Lorentzian spacetime and thus not relevant to density perturbations. But their properties are important in establishing the meaning of the Euclidean path integral. If negative modes are present, the Euclidean path integral is not well defined, but may nevertheless be useful in an approximate description of the decay of an unstable state. When gravitational dynamics is included, counting negative modes requires a careful treatment of the conformal factor problem. We demonstrate that for an appropriate choice of coordinate on phase space, the second order Euclidean action is bounded below for normalized perturbations and has a finite number of negative modes. We prove that there is a negative mode for many gravitational Instantons of the Hawking-Moss or Coleman-De Luccia type, and discuss the associated spectral flow. We also investigate Hawking-Turok constrained Instantons, which occur in a generic inflationary model. Implementing the regularization and constraint proposed by Kirklin, Turok and Wiseman, we find that those Instantons leading to substantial inflation do not possess negative modes. Using an alternate regularization and constraint motivated by reduction from five dimensions, we find a negative mode is present. These investigations shed new light on the suitability of Euclidean quantum gravity as a potential description of our universe. Comment: 16 pages, compressed and RevTex file, including one postscript figure file

www.researchgate.net...

Abstract: The Kasner solutions of the Einstein equations within the General Relativity, i.e. (0, 0, 1) and (2/3, 2/3, -1/3), concern the gravitationally massless superluminal entanglement of the Einstein-spacetime components. For entanglement are responsible the superluminal zero-helicity vector particles/entanglons. The new interpretation of the Einstein formula E = mcc leads to conclusion that Nature using the matter, i.e. the Einstein-spacetime components, “copies” the non-gravitational objects in bigger scales so there appear the cores of baryons, electrons and new cosmology. In such phase transitions appear the spinors applied in the Quantum Physics. The entanglons appeared during the inflation in the first phase transition of the modified Higgs field and both fields, i.e. the modified Higgs field and the field composed of the exchanged entanglons in some structure satisfy all initial conditions for the Kasner solutions. The Kasner solutions define many properties of the spinors. The Kasner solution (0, 0, 1) describes spinning loop composed of the exchanged entanglons that entangle the Einstein-spacetime components whereas the generalized Kasner solution (2/3, 2/3, -1/3) describes binary system of tori composed of the exchanged entanglons. The two tori have parallel spins and the directions of spin overlap but their internal helicities are opposite. We can partially unify the gravity and quantum physics via the Kasner solutions. The basic mathematical method applied in Quantum Physics, i.e. the action of some orthogonal groups on column vector that leads to the spin representations, is some generalization of action of matrix of rotation of a circle around the z-axis on circle on xy plane defined parametrically and written as a column – such action leads to the parametric equations for torus. The Kasner solutions as well lead to the holography. The symmetrical decays of multi-loops lead to the Theory of Chaos.

www.vixra.org...

Now how exactly are you defining Decay?

a reply to: Astrocyte I am not native to the language you express your idea with, neither I think it is the best way to put a thesis on topic like this, however after few readings of the science rant you did, I can say I agree with the conclusions you make. People are easy prey for the mind-predator "suggestive" and "ideological" concepts of many politicians/revolutionaries/hoaxers and such. Humans tend to "lose their mind to much and to often, falling into oblivion". However the fault is only their own. Leaving your mind uncontrolled, unobserved, it quickly finds it's "new master" in the surrounding environment or in the collective opinion.