An Extension of Heart through Silicon

A few comments about the silicon interface and of our role to play in the future of thought: all discourse necessitates the bloody mess of the human heart in order to see through. This cannot save discourse, nor does it diminish the cold beauty of silicon that rests in its perfect silicon shape as a crystalline form. Thought will continue to produce dazzling crystalline complexes, palaces of the intellect housed within the internet, temporarily, for the sake of the ongoing process of viewing, evaluating, measuring and transforming.

It still takes the human heart, beset with grief, a capacity to be mortal, to die at the right time. The problem of the future is that it exists without our capacity in the present to pre-determine the outcome. It is the best that a human can do to offer sketches that move us toward this future, hoping that it will offer an abundance of possibility of life, but we cannot determine or figure what this life will be.

The heart extends. This is one of its primary evolutionary functions. We call it heart because the location of this intelligence comes from our chest, from a beating drum whose condition extends from broken-ness. The broken heart is the best, and philosophy, without a heart, and without a willingness to acknowledge the sovereignty of the heart, rapidly becomes barren.

Spatial extension is one of our prime insights. We see and experience extension and space, and without this spatiality all elements of experience lose their ability to differentiate themselves. The heart creates space, in extending to our fellow beings, to seek sentience outside ourselves is itself one of the primary acts of sentience, along with the wish to help whatever sentience is emerging to come forth.

When we work with others who need us to extend ourselves in some way, this extension, stepping out of our comfort zone, to a place of potential connection. Extension is never comfortable, and it extends beyond the selfish desire of an individual Dasein for self-preservation. "What have I ever lost by dying?" asks Rumi. This is never easy for me if what dies is me. Nevertheless the approach of a possible state of technological singularity implies the extension of consciousness beyond the simple self: we then become continuously conscious that it is not our intelligence that we seek to extend, but systems of intelligence, and aggregates of systems of intelligence.

Philosophy involves at least one form of understanding the universe by seeing the world through an abstraction, a form of "extension" that defines space: "pure extension" without content. A relativistic universe sees contexts of bending and warping space according to force: gravity creates gravity wells that we are told bend light and matter itself. There is still a conception of a grid with the coordinates x, y, z, and t. These are the Kantian categories of fundamental intuitions about experience.

Time itself is warped by the primacy of interest, or the fascination of an image, dwelling in this image either makes "time fly," or make it "drag on" without end in sight. We could say that all extensions depend on the capacity of consciousness to be engaged with a given image to make it work.

What I offered here at the beginning of this web log was an image of a quartz crystal, SiO2, silicon as carrying the light of a candle, and held in between Deborah's and my hand. The crystal image was then photographed and turned into an image on the web, held in silicon, carried forward through electricity. So far what silicon does, as an intelligence interface with our carbon-based intelligence, is to add or extend memory. It is "extended" only in the most rudimentary, utilitarian sense, and without giving much grace to the silicon to which we are indebted for this ability. Crystals are ancient symbols, used, since days of old for intuitive purposes, for their beauty, for their ability to convey light. Intuitively crystals were used for scrying and for meditation, thoughts always about the future and about thought as "delivering" consciousness (as one delivers a child through the perils of childbirth). The experience of sharing this "gazing" into the crystal continued to reflect back into my Dasein its own finitude, and that this finitude made possible an ability to have any magic at all in the world: that is to say an accumulation of complex energy. I have mentioned before that one teaching concerning magic in its capability to heal comes from the capacity to really listen, I could not ascribe anything really to this crystal, other than that I, as the viewer, was a confused, somewhat broken heart/consciousness attempting to put some measure of love into the circumstance. I realized that that was enough. The crystal both carries light through from "the other side" (wherever that might be, possibly some future) and toward the "sagenhaftige Druber" from me... but it also reflects light back to the sources of emanation: and it reflected back to me my own confusion and concern, and it was enough to see that that too was a necessary element in an apparently beautiful experience....

But crystals are cold, and they carry light and energy best when the warmth is held outside of their matrix. The warmth is in the receiver: and this is the best intuitive message I can receive from this crystal: it takes us to have a crystal. A similar parable came from Calvino's story of Mr. Palomar gazing at "the sword of the sun," considering the miracle of an engaged consciousness that can actually perceive and articulate intelligence. Crystals need us, and not just for the sake of our ability to "process" information, but for our ability to deliver out of the process something akin to a work of art. At bottom they need our warmth and our distance "en extensio" being able to see the light that they can carry. This does not give precedence to the heart, because the essence of the heart is to extend itself into a system, a dialectic even, where it continually necessitates the crystal for its existence and insight. The heart does not exist alone, nor does human Dasein exist in a privileged relation to things: it is relationship.

But what can a philosophy of the heart do or say other than that it is the philosophy of the heart, and that it should take some precedence over the philosophy of the intellect? A phrase from Wittgenstein that has always annoyed me is that philosophy is a form of sickness of thought, or thought seeking a cure for an over-agitated intellect. Philosophy at the same time seems to run aground if it seeks purely to order and regulate according to some "sovereignty," never questioning sovereignty to its roots in violence. The current violence behind our ordering and regulation of life has to do with an imbalance of ourselves as a certain kind of intelligence that has yet to find adequate relation and balance with other non-speaking intelligences. In this manner the philosophy of the extension of the heart looks at the non-speaking world that is on the margins of our discourse to have something to say, for example: trees, forests, oceanic systems, polar bears, sunlight, tracks of dirt, wind-currents, and so on. At the risk of sounding "animistic" the question of soul at this time comes from the speaking of the souls of our environment. The saving (salvave) of our soul comes from allowing our soul to speak: to find the moments when it is more akin to a "mineral soul," or the soul of an ocelot, for example, than merely the deadened world of an ego, administrator, or bureaucrat.

To save and to deliver are not necessarily the same thing, though both require doctoring.

Doctoring comes from a quest of a doctor to find and administer a "universal medicine" for our suffering souls. Many times a doctor can apply a healing salve, or at best set a course for the body to repair itself. The doctor takes on the hurling force, the elan of the wound itself, as the doctor takes on the parabolic force of a patient's projections, and then hurls or throws this force onward into a direction that implies the greatest healing is possible given the knowledge the doctor has of a specific living system. The impact of the wound should strike the man of knowledge, who has specific training and education in order to absorb the damage of the disease and then pass the destructive vector of the disease onward, hopefully out of pathology and into a path of increased life. Many times medical doctors, general practitioners, have to have enough training not only to deal with dressing wounds, and restoring the body to health, but with another existential function which runs a course similar to a wound: the perilous path of gestation and childbirth. The doctor thus "delivers." Many times the doctor can be himself at stake, at least in terms of his "reputation," if he delivers poorly. On the worst side, we can think of "delivering results," as being part of a technological discourse that always taxes and demands a "higher yield" from the energies invested. This fails only insofar as the system of energy that is interested in a "higher yield" is profoundly limited, for example the cancerous "setting upon" of matter by consumer capitalism. Here, the issue of "more, more, more" simply leads the consumer into a buying frenzy that taxes the resources of this planet and threatens a massive extinction and collapse of a relatively complicated human economic subsystem (all the while threatening to take out a bunch of other systems who, at times, are more interesting than the obcessive, moribund system of human sentimentality that threatens to criminally eliminate diversity for the sake of it's sole survival). But the doctor that has the best view in mind is the one who can envision a "greater" system of whole-ness to which that yield can be returned. (this is where Habermas, for example, in thinking philosophers as bureaucratic administrators is not wrong, just blind. The question is: to envision "health" on as dynamic and multivalent level of possible rational and non-rational systems of discourse as possible. This means playing language games with very explicit sets of rules that connect to language games with very loose sets of rules and very broad connective valences... to allow the electric lightning, the synaptic spark of metaphor, and Zeus as the divine element of metaphor who sets about setting things in order, to extend itself beyond literal interpretation.)

Let us extend the lens of doctoring and the question of return or yield, delivering. Do we consider only the economy of a specific nation-state? Do we consider a world economy of human beings? Do we consider a sentient economy of all essents? Perhaps that is part of the failing of modern metaphysics: to not regard the capacity of all essents (Wesenden) as radically ex-istent? If our economy stood for NOT taking-for-granted ("data," "es gibt") a single shred of existence in our capacity to think and transform ourselves, whatever we were doing: could we stand beyond paralysis that such an awareness would portend: could we still be animate, processing, eating, self-consuming/devouring... but somehow more consciously?

What I have offered here at times is way too heavy in terms of its explanation, and perhaps too light in terms of the stories that make such explanation necessary. It appears for the time being I have "something to say," though there are those who may criticize all this as chatter ("Rede") that lacks an existential component of Sprache. It appears I have something to say so far as I am blessed by seeing a connection. So often I will return to having nothing to say, waiting attendant to speaking and healing and delivering.

On Waking

Waking is part of the work of this web-log. So it is natural that we should pursue the tone and intention of the project of "waking."

I have been asked by an associate with a less than mild temperament that I somehow need to wake up: "Wake up mate." Generally this has to do with a confused conversation dealing with ethnic values in politics. I am of the absolute belief that only radical tolerance will be sufficient to help us to prevail as a species. I am intolerant of intolerance. I believe in cultural diversity but a shared capacity to communicate and to heal one another. Healing.

In the wrong reading all this sounds like politically correct fluff. In the right context it is a highly developed a way to approach human relationship.

Every spirtual development that yearns to evolve always carries with it a shadow of repression. It is a matter of how the hatred is repressed, stifled and killed: which means that it must be killed in a lived manner. This is called psychological work: living the death of instinct is just one aspect. Survival is another.

In a deeply compelling book, given to me by my friend Oppermann, called "The Second Book," the author Bazdulj begins with a series of poetic wakings. These are the wakings of Friedrich Nietzsche on toward the end of the end of his life. These may be the most poetic treatment of the topic of waking since Adonai breathed life into the red clay Adam at the beginning. If we suspend disbelief for a moment, and consider it possible that Nietzsche was the actual genius who imagined the Uebermensch, conceived it within the heat of his own creative force, then we could say that Nietzsche's waking in this book heralded a close to the waking that had taken place since the time of Adam.

Even more complex is Muharem Bazdulj's next chapter devoted to a possibly fictional letter to an editor of a journal of a highly earnest (perhaps a bit too earnest) fellow on the nature of a friend's poetry, a "Muhamed Deznetic" which carries an Islamic religious undertone, both to the interpreter and to the poems cited. With Bazdulj one can not be too careful with correcting one's literalisms, but perhaps I digress from the subject of waking too much into the issue of tolerance and ethnic sensitivity.

However this associate that urges me vehemently to "Wake up mate." And this brings us to the very mediocre and very impoverished subject of Franklin Deleno. The Article he pointed to was:
http://freakylynx.livejournal.com/511564.html
I laugh and think about how I mistrust the information found in web logs in general. The source article belongs here:
http://www.ornery.org/essays/warwatch/2008-10-05-1.html

I don't find Deleno very likeable according to one fellow's judgement of his corporate involvements that led to him getting fabulously wealthy and played a part in the implosion of the stock market in October 2008. I won't name corporate names because it becomes rapidly too nauseating to do so. I do not really want to do much more research on the subject, since the area of high finance is largely beneath me. If it isn't "beneath" me, as many will be quick to point out, then I am simply an idiot and it is beyond me, and my "values." High finance and paper markets, "Jenseits von Gut und Boese." I can send them to hell and they will quickly send me to hell. Perhaps it is simply beyond the ken of my own nausea, and others, including my interlocutor will say "wake and survive, or stay asleep and drown or die."

Most of the time this kind of waking, into this form of nausea is intolerable. Sometimes waking with a feeling of Nausea is unfortunately what I am subjected to. But in this brutal "bardo" (meaning "passage through the realm of death and beyond") of revulsion we come to yet another name of surpassing mediocrity: Orson Scott Card.

"Ad Hominem" arguments are considered logical fallacies. But I will make these two brief points:

1. very brief research with the debatable resource of Wikipedia indicates he places an extraordinary emphasis on a kind of homophobia. Card I believe refers to gay marriage as that which "marks the end of Democracy in America." Such an extremist view already puts our friend Card in the camp of individuals for whom the concept of Democracy has never fully been understood. I bid him fare well in his own stupor.
2. The second point can be found on "civilization watch": That is that the "War on Terror" is one of the biggest lies sold to the "American Public" (which itself is a bizarre cavorting mass of confusion) is the "War on Terror," it is worse than a lie: it is terror precipitating itself. I am not saying we should "bury our heads in the sand" any more than we should "draw lines" in it. http://www.ornery.org/essays/warwatch/2006-10-29-1.html

It is not enough to use these comments to debunk Card's argument that the Democratic party might have got into bed with the Devil and refused regulation of major corporate entities. I do not know the full scope of the political nuances that might have justified these blockages of much needed regulation. Perhaps others will provide some of the sense or non-sense that situated the Democratic snare in a bubble of "trust" bursting with all the "busted" morgatages of the "American Dream." We will have to see what the outcome will be.

I have been warned not to tread where my feet do not have a solid ground of sufficient political research, however I can hardly refer to the man in question as a reliable paragon of trust, "integrity and honesty." Yes, I believe that "integrity and honesty" are what we have left to stand for, but we can see that these values mean widely different things in a world where we must watch our own shadows so carefully.

I can point to the fact that the European world of religion and politics is now transplanted onto American soil. The place we live in is ours and we belong to it only in a contested manner. The "love it or leave it" mentality espoused frequently from the "right" should begin first with those people who speak the statement.

We are immigrants: and as Europeans we know only "to take" as our value. Such a value is markedly less wise than those who eschew "taking" and espouse "acceptance."

Balduj comments on two days in Nietzsche's life: the last day of the year 1888 and the first day of the year 1889. Balduj makes a great deal of the januarial nature of such an instant: Heiroglyphs of sunlight shine on the wall of Nietzsche's room on his waking still in 1888, in 1889 he remembers that Heiroglyphs intend both what they mean and the exact opposite. Such symbolism and indeterminacy borders on the sublime.

I know that when I wake it is many times in the dark, accompanied by the sound of an annoying electronic alarm clock powered by a single AA battery. The sound is unpleasant, grindingly technological. I stumble from my bed and dictate my dreams into a digital voice recorder. While the sun is still absent I hurry to brush my teeth, dress and take my morning walk. Such provisions as a morning walk serve to keep me sane when dealing with significant excoriations of workplace stress. I wake with dreams from the night before, and these dreams are precious to me, since they are not frequently dictated to me by anyone I have mentioned here so far. They are hints at liberation, at a sense of my own telling of a story of life in this world that opposes a world of stories, some of which are right and some of which are wrong. I wake with a sense that what I had surrendured to in sleep is somehow precious to me, and moreover, that I must make every endeavor to make sense of these pronouncements.

My dreams have never told me to vote along any party lines. They have told me to look at what revolts me and to learn from it.

I do not know what our friends or their authorities wake from or wake to. I do not know if these wakings are beautiful or devilish. Waking is one of the most intimate moments of the day, regardless of the partner one shares one's bed with: the only issue is to find the "integrity and honesty" to love that partner as fully as one can.

So much waking needs to be done. The soul of the world demands that we look upon the citizens of this world with an equal sense of love, be they our own biological offspring or the children of others, who have other names for their gods. I can say that in all likelyhood the best dreams that anyone can wake from are the dreams that force us to deal with our revulsion in a significant way that carries the revulsion and our deepest care for all speaking with us on this matter.

When we wake, we open our eyes. To open our eyes is to see, but all vision that is true vision comes from grief, from a knowledge of death. Sometimes ideas and opinions have to die. Sometimes intolerance has to die. Sometimes our loved ones have to die. Sometimes we have to die. Life gains its value from right-acceptance of death, not longing for death, nor morbidly clinging to the last vestages of what we believed to be the true life. To "take" remains the provenance of death, just as it is for life to "accept" the painful stipulations, the sting of death, in order for it to be truely aware, and to awake. The true life awaits us when we see clearly through the painful doorway of grief.