This is a follow up to yesterday’s video reiterating my thoughts about Live Action Role Play with encoded artefacts as an example of extended mind and possible future inter-dimensional information processing system. The talk goes along with two earlier talks Jason and I did on the work of Michael Mateas here. The feature image is taken from Paul Pangaro’s online archive of Pask materials that is very much worth exploring here.
I am including a few maps if you want to poke around. All maps are best viewed on a laptop.
One features Pask’s cybernetic (an synesthetic) endeavors. Click here for the interactive version – enter “Pask” in the search barn top to the left if needed to zoom in again.
One shows Jacobo Moreno and Timothy Leary’s work in psychology and group dynamics through role play. Click here for the interactive version – enter “Moreno” in the search barn top to the left if needed to zoom in again.
One shows Mateas, LARPing, and non-traditional materials that compute. Click here for the interactive version – enter Mateas in the search barn top to the left if needed to zoom in again.
One shows distributed cognition with respect to context and encoded artifacts. Click here for the interactive version – enter “Distributed Cognition” in the search barn top to the left if needed to zoom in again.
One shows DAO voting, which I believe relates to collapsing waves in Quantum Potential. Click here for the interactive version – enter “Extended Mind” in the search barn top to the left if needed to zoom in again.
Enjoy!
Good day Alison,
Lots of interesting synchronicities here. First I wanted to respond to your request from the last video and just say that I think you have a very youthful spirit, chipped tooth or not, the spirit animates your body with powerful energy reverberating throughout the field.
I’m coming at this whole reality from a pretty different story, and I’m relatively inexperienced so bear with me. I have been trying to understand how this system works. Parts of it are artificial and parts of it are organic. I sometimes see it as entirely organic as it all exists within the field and must therefore resonate with it or eventually fall flat and become silent.
Cybernetics came to me as a response to my hypothesis that if my understanding of ancient history is correct then a science of human control must have been developed. I became particularly interested in the work of Stafford Beer: the Viable System Model (modelled after the human nervous system, I’m sure you’re probably familiar), and the Syntegration process (a way or organizing large-scale solution-oriented conversations).
I hadn’t bothered to look at who was funding them or steering their efforts, so I know I lack some of the picture. I was however, from the very beginning, interested in finding better ways of organizing our communities. Looking at the corruption in the world, I was convinced that there must be better ways of communicating with each other, ways that also ensured the wholistic well-being of the entire system.
I was betting on the central role of communication in the system’s well being due to the other main strand of my research mainly related to the role of language in shaping reality. Coming from an religious background, I was interested in magic’s alleged power to influence reality using symbols of power. The more I read up on that, the more I realized it was all about shaping reality in people’s minds. People’s minds were the engines driving local reality. The priest class had, after learning the ways from prophets and messengers, twisted the divine locution to benefit themselves. Fine.
Everything seemed to point me back to symbolism. I have been developing way to parse the symbols that present themselves in my experiences and exploring ways to respond.
I understand many people have fears concerning the role of technology in this coming new age of human awareness. I shared those fears. However, there is a design that’s been shaping in my mind for a few years that aligns with the descriptions you give to the human computation project.
It has kept coming to me in the form of dreams and visions and I’ve had lots of difficulty clearly articulating it. I’m compelled to try to implement it technologically but some communications indicate the system will only become operational through people’s literacy in the divine locution.
However, I’ve seen the benefits that technology has had in people having access to this kind of information, and in connecting with others who share the same sense of responsibility in moving the universe’s goal forward, not that any single one of us can see the full picture. It’s a bee hive.
I’m working on a simple model to start experimenting with this idea of a more intentional or conscious collaborative creation or world-narratives. Given most of ‘our’ insights have come from works in scriptural interpretation and symbolism, this has yielded motifs linking the earth to the scripture or, in general, a domain of work, the heavens to the layers of abstract understanding, rain as divine guidance, different kinds of plants as different kinds of yields based on your way of toiling on the earth, clouds as potential understanding, etc. This metaphorical network of concepts has grown substantially over the years.
The simple model consists of a collaborative tool for taking a set of givens or observations as the base layer, and building layers above it. Questions based on the observations, hypotheses from the questions, potential points of validation of some hypothesis, then a couple of steps of verification to ensure solid understanding.
A problem I keep encountering the that of evidence for some understanding. It seems that what one takes as evidence to support some hypothesis can vary wildly from person to person. People talk about the wisdom of the crowds but crowds can easily be steered so consensus can’t be trusted.
I’m still working on all this. Hope it wasn’t a waste of your time.
Take care.