disrupter
10-09-2008, 08:13 AM
Warning, a real grab bag of chattering notions.
fear makes us more accessible to our flights of imagination.
Perhaps making fear an imagination amplifier.
Whether this is an incidental effect, perhaps divorced from the heightened muscle reflex readiness or not i'm not sure.
It could be that the deeply evolutionarily embedded fear response is just having odd effects in conjuction within organisms of heightened consciousness.
Of course it doesn't mean we can't use it as a mind mining tool.
fear is a [one] drama amplifier.
Drama probably has to do with some kind of heightened focusing of the mind. Something that grasps/engages our attention. Often seductive in its characteristics. Sort of an elaboration of mental processing, making it sort of burn or wallow out an impression in our brains. Sometimes anxiously drawing us in or alternately allowing us to lounge upon, bask in its grandeur & majesty or to be struck with the awe of something.
One presumes that fear is irrational.
But obviously evolution has favored some distribution of fear in us [most animal species. plants?].
So in a sense it may be leveraging irrationality to some rational end.
fear creates an anticipatory edge. A heightened awareness &/or readiness, just prior to some potential event occurring.
[completely unrelated topic.]
Sexual reproduction is a homogenizing process.
While uniquely individual circumstances determine outcomes for an individual,
the homogenizing nature of sexual reproduction causes its preponderance in the gene pool to be statistical in nature. Obviously something must arise to at least appearing intermittently as an actually occurring trait, even if pretty rare. Of course it makes one wonder if a lot of potential traits don't happen because it simply got lost in the noise. Or if because of a few mishaps of individuals with a potentially beneficial trait had some bad/fatal luck it never got launched in the gene pool. Or is it possible that due to the conservative nature of genetics that things linger around, even unexpressed, until they can & do start showing up as traits, which then can mechanistically play a role in the statistics of evolution. If the trait is specific to a single individual then it must linger until it reflects back, crosses/intersects upon itself in the gene pool to arise again as an expressed trait.
It seems likely that the only reason our line of inheritance produced us with our reckless, devastating 'success' & not some other species is because some potential trait(s) arose to actual traits & statistically that leveraged our species/population to success. Ecology is the sculptor of genetic requisites as well as condoning of 'advantage'. It makes one wonder if there are incredible potentials for genetics that have never happened, simply due to the lame mechanism of evolutionary 'advancement'. Because the ecology either never demanded them &/or never created the necessarily graduated step-wise cultivation of them.
[another unrelated notion]
amoebas & bones
I was wondering if articulated, disciplined motion might have happened prior to bone-type structurization.
If an amoeba moves consistently & without exception as though it had some linear appendage on a hinge, does it not seem possible that matter will settle & even rigidify to some extent in the pattern like a cartilage or bone in that 'appendageafied' region? (And the muscle/nerve response system to articulate it?) That would fit with physics. Moving water carves through solid stone, whereas where water slows its pace the particulate matter it carries drops out of mix/solution creating sediments.
Even if this never happened in evolution, it still seems like a very applicable notion for abstraction in our lives. Like presuming/preparing for something to happen sets aside resources for that which may be applied to something similar to that happening, or to something else, different that happens.
It is why form & formality can matter. Ceremony is like a preparatory action for something. Like opening ourselves to somewhat ambiguous mysticism is a preparation to be awed. A readiness to accept that which is new so our minds do not gloss over it. In some ways it is like setting aside part of our capacity in idle/fallow that we can use & have available for some future, unknown events or demands. It is sort of speculative in nature. We don't know what will happen, but we know a variety of things have happened. It is like opening ourselves to the possibility. Making our intellects accessible to the unknownness of the future.
It is hard [impossible?] to imagine our concrete circumstances don't determine much of what/who we are, especially initially,
But an available, readily accessible & applicable mind can create a wildly different path for us as individuals as well as for us as a species.
Technology is applied imagination.
We can imagine needs, we can imagine means to address those needs,
obviously though, at some point it is about applying the imagination/imaginings to the specific particulars of our circumstances that matters. Getting the rubber to optimally meet the road.
Milton Friedman talked about how ideas that are lying around are those that get grabbed in a time of crisis.
Naomi Klein suggests that we have more & perhaps better ideas lying around so when a crisis arises we will have more constructive outcomes because we have better ideas to apply.
Maybe it is sort of applied neurosis?
The more obsessively self-consumed & neurotic the idea the more [easily?] likely we are to latch onto it?
of course that seems to defy the very notion of rational mental processing.
maybe it matters less what we apply & only that we have something, anything to apply?
Elaborated self description of an idea may give it a kind of 'structural soundness'? ie. we get so lost in & enamored of the details we forget just how silly it is.
If you are reading this you probably have too much free time & are abysmally bored.
fear makes us more accessible to our flights of imagination.
Perhaps making fear an imagination amplifier.
Whether this is an incidental effect, perhaps divorced from the heightened muscle reflex readiness or not i'm not sure.
It could be that the deeply evolutionarily embedded fear response is just having odd effects in conjuction within organisms of heightened consciousness.
Of course it doesn't mean we can't use it as a mind mining tool.
fear is a [one] drama amplifier.
Drama probably has to do with some kind of heightened focusing of the mind. Something that grasps/engages our attention. Often seductive in its characteristics. Sort of an elaboration of mental processing, making it sort of burn or wallow out an impression in our brains. Sometimes anxiously drawing us in or alternately allowing us to lounge upon, bask in its grandeur & majesty or to be struck with the awe of something.
One presumes that fear is irrational.
But obviously evolution has favored some distribution of fear in us [most animal species. plants?].
So in a sense it may be leveraging irrationality to some rational end.
fear creates an anticipatory edge. A heightened awareness &/or readiness, just prior to some potential event occurring.
[completely unrelated topic.]
Sexual reproduction is a homogenizing process.
While uniquely individual circumstances determine outcomes for an individual,
the homogenizing nature of sexual reproduction causes its preponderance in the gene pool to be statistical in nature. Obviously something must arise to at least appearing intermittently as an actually occurring trait, even if pretty rare. Of course it makes one wonder if a lot of potential traits don't happen because it simply got lost in the noise. Or if because of a few mishaps of individuals with a potentially beneficial trait had some bad/fatal luck it never got launched in the gene pool. Or is it possible that due to the conservative nature of genetics that things linger around, even unexpressed, until they can & do start showing up as traits, which then can mechanistically play a role in the statistics of evolution. If the trait is specific to a single individual then it must linger until it reflects back, crosses/intersects upon itself in the gene pool to arise again as an expressed trait.
It seems likely that the only reason our line of inheritance produced us with our reckless, devastating 'success' & not some other species is because some potential trait(s) arose to actual traits & statistically that leveraged our species/population to success. Ecology is the sculptor of genetic requisites as well as condoning of 'advantage'. It makes one wonder if there are incredible potentials for genetics that have never happened, simply due to the lame mechanism of evolutionary 'advancement'. Because the ecology either never demanded them &/or never created the necessarily graduated step-wise cultivation of them.
[another unrelated notion]
amoebas & bones
I was wondering if articulated, disciplined motion might have happened prior to bone-type structurization.
If an amoeba moves consistently & without exception as though it had some linear appendage on a hinge, does it not seem possible that matter will settle & even rigidify to some extent in the pattern like a cartilage or bone in that 'appendageafied' region? (And the muscle/nerve response system to articulate it?) That would fit with physics. Moving water carves through solid stone, whereas where water slows its pace the particulate matter it carries drops out of mix/solution creating sediments.
Even if this never happened in evolution, it still seems like a very applicable notion for abstraction in our lives. Like presuming/preparing for something to happen sets aside resources for that which may be applied to something similar to that happening, or to something else, different that happens.
It is why form & formality can matter. Ceremony is like a preparatory action for something. Like opening ourselves to somewhat ambiguous mysticism is a preparation to be awed. A readiness to accept that which is new so our minds do not gloss over it. In some ways it is like setting aside part of our capacity in idle/fallow that we can use & have available for some future, unknown events or demands. It is sort of speculative in nature. We don't know what will happen, but we know a variety of things have happened. It is like opening ourselves to the possibility. Making our intellects accessible to the unknownness of the future.
It is hard [impossible?] to imagine our concrete circumstances don't determine much of what/who we are, especially initially,
But an available, readily accessible & applicable mind can create a wildly different path for us as individuals as well as for us as a species.
Technology is applied imagination.
We can imagine needs, we can imagine means to address those needs,
obviously though, at some point it is about applying the imagination/imaginings to the specific particulars of our circumstances that matters. Getting the rubber to optimally meet the road.
Milton Friedman talked about how ideas that are lying around are those that get grabbed in a time of crisis.
Naomi Klein suggests that we have more & perhaps better ideas lying around so when a crisis arises we will have more constructive outcomes because we have better ideas to apply.
Maybe it is sort of applied neurosis?
The more obsessively self-consumed & neurotic the idea the more [easily?] likely we are to latch onto it?
of course that seems to defy the very notion of rational mental processing.
maybe it matters less what we apply & only that we have something, anything to apply?
Elaborated self description of an idea may give it a kind of 'structural soundness'? ie. we get so lost in & enamored of the details we forget just how silly it is.
If you are reading this you probably have too much free time & are abysmally bored.