[-empyre-] Resistance is Futile :)

Tue Jul 2 22:13:55 EST 2013

Hi Terry

Some very interesting and nuanced ideas here. Where is thought? Where is mind? Where is the voice in our heads we often characterise as thinking? What other forms might thinking/thought assume, especially in a technological society? How can we, in this context, avoid a dualist dead-end? Contested territory.

Philosophers like Andy Clark might propose that mind and cognition are not functions of the individual sentient being but a networked and extended process that engages multiple agents - not just people but technical and other systems. Sue Hawksley (another of this month's discussants) undertook her PhD supervised by Andy and she might wish to comment on this. Bruno Latour's work on on inter-agency is highly salient here.

James Leach, an anthropologist who was a guest on empyre about a year ago, might propose that mind is not a property of the individual but a negotiated collective (social) state from which we individually emerge (although in his thinking the notion of the individual is likely problematic). In this context the individual mind/self/internal-voice emerges from a complexity of voices that situate themselves through various performative activities.

Big Data could be considered in these terms - a sort of dark matter that permeates what we recognise as knowledge - that which we can articulate as a shared understanding of things. How does Big Data, as a form of collective pre-knowledge, relate to our perception of things and sense of self in a technologised society? Returning to Latour, how might his insights into scientific practices interact with Leach's ideas concerning the social performance of the self? More generally, how might we consider these questions in relation to networked social media, where many of these processes can be seen played out?

I fear you will read what I've written here and think it is of an ilk you might consider as an "obsessive compulsive rehearsing of highly stratified bureaucratic cataloguing of meaning". It might well be. If so then I'd be especially interested in your thoughts.

best

Simon

On 2 Jul 2013, at 08:36, Terry Flaxton <Terry.Flaxton at uwe.ac.uk> wrote:

> ----------empyre- soft-skinned space----------------------
> I'm not sure how the list works but I offer what follows as a provocation for discussion:
> 
> 
> I sat through ISEA, as with many other conferences and for a long time an idea has been growing in me that challenges what I've been hearing: I feel that theoretical constructs alone are without worth. Put another way: The end of theory is nigh.
> 
> Take a construct like that of 'Big Data' where we now have accepted an idea that there are trawling algorithms that can find sufficient meaning to agglomerate a conclusion from our collective behaviour both online and via social media. But this is a narrative construct about one behaviour that has appeared to have been successful. Whether it is really successful is another thing.
> 
> Big Data, if it exists, is a consequence of two things: Industrialisation of repetitive tasks and the tendency of the Western Mind to require a particular kind of answer. The 'repetitive tasks' in this case are the so called democratic free thoughts of earths individuals - thinking as if freely and yet constrained by an obsessive compulsive rehearsing of received thinking. I'm not sure whether the Eastern Mind is susceptible to the same level by left brain dominant thinking - I suspect though, that this is also the case.
> 
> ...But Big Data does not exist. It is a fairy tale for consumption.
> 
> A cognitive approximation of hope and fear distributed within a fairy-tale mime.
> 
> Theory, or the obsessive compulsive rehearsing of highly stratified bureaucratic cataloguing of meaning, by the societal grouping known as academia (and associated groupings), is now dead.
> Here are my reasons for thinking this:
> 
> For several million years the human project has advanced its requirement to export memory and knowledge outside of itself, beyond the material, into its exogramatic form, data.
> 
> Prior cognitive distributive networks are reconfiguring to enable this development to engage in valuable exchange, but the 'language' that has served us well previously, is no longer fit for task and is currently responsible for remediating the vista before us – the consequence is that the landscape we view seems to appear as one thing, but is in fact something else altogether.
> 
> Effectively our thinking minds are getting in the way.
> New 'language' is developing but due to an increased velocitisation of human experience language is lagging behind neural developments - the reason being, theoretic language per se developed from the needs of the prior paradigm and is of a ratiocinatory bureaucratic construction. Using it to describe something that is beyond its nature renders it inherently reductionist.
> 
> We now need to conceptualise new forms of communication to suit and be relevant to the paradigmatic changes within cognitive distributive networks – Fortunately for us, Art is the primary vessel for this communication. Unfortunately for us, current artistic behaviour is rehearsing past and increasingly irrelevant concerns.
> 
> In developing an appropriate response to the nature of the incoming paradigm, we need to cognate beyond the kinds of thought we have known until now - we need to create new behaviours that utilise our next developmental stage of mind, which uses entrainment rather than ratiocinatory, rehearsed frontal lobe behaviour, as its primary form.
> 
>  …So I've stayed away from the analogue based theoretical language of the last 70 years because that use of language compromises the possible changes. Given my proposition, ratiocination is the 'worry-beads' of the mind, but entrainment is a possible way of leading towards a way in which the human psyche can now begin to respond. There’s nothing wrong with the thinking mind – in its place - which is to follow, rather than lead human cognition.
> 
> The thinking mind takes its lead from the deep cognitive mind. 
> 
> Between the two is the intermediary state, which used to be described as intuition. It processed deep cognition and rendered it understandable to the thinking mind - intuition in gnostic circles was known as inward teaching, where the thinking mind was 'instructed' in its duties. Now intuition is simply the intermediary process - because our late Enlightenment thinking requires demystification. But demystification empowers thinking and disempowers intuitive cognition.
> 
> This description is another fairy tale - but:
> Becoming sensitive to the production of this mechanism is the primary behaviour required for understanding the incoming paradigm - and resistance, in this particular case, is futile.
> 
> 
> 
> 
> Terry Flaxton
> Professor of Cinematography and Lens Based Media
> University of West of England
> http://www.visualfields.co.uk/flaxtonpage1.htm
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
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Simon Biggs
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