people

From an earlier topic of discussion:

"people tend to like talking with other people about topics of mutual
concern"

"the most fun part of working on a project is talking about it with
enthusiastic coconspirators"

We never figured out why -- maybe just aired the assumption that since
humans are social creatures, they need to do things in a social
context, which usually means talking to other people.

This reminds me of a quote from William Burroughs, which goes
something along the lines of -- "People ask if I get lonely. No; I
rarely suffer from the feeling people call loneliness, because of my
characters; they are very real to me, and generally are more
interesting than other people." (The actual quote would be found in
the book "The Job".)

Perhaps there is something about simulated interaction that stimulates
the same parts of the brain as real interaction. Hence: books, both
read and written, games -- and even "virtual" exchanges, like email.

Sometimes on a solipsistic bent I have imagined all my exchanges via
the computer to be with one entity, say, "the group mind". Of course,
if there was "one entity" out there (which on some level is certainly
true), then it is not homogeneous, and different people correspond to
nice blobular components of this thing. And brains are adapted to
think in terms of these sorts of blobs.

Indeed we may have precisely: a brain blob (or neural attractor)
corresponding to each person we know. If some person we like
"approves" of something we do, then the corresponding blob delivers
happy juice to the rest of the brain, whereas if this person
"disapproves" of something we do, unhappy juice is delivered instead.
(This paraphrases Marvin Minsky from "The Emotion Machine".)

It won't do to be swimming in happy juice all the time or one would
step in front a bus by accident and when gazing at a butterfly or a
flower garden. The brain's critical power runs mainly on unhappy
juice. Of course, a more common understanding is that swimming in
unhappy juice is also bad; under those circumstances you get people
stepping in front of busses not on accident.

How best to cope? E.g., how to ride the waves of motivation to reach
a suitable campsite?

Option A: Just accept things the way they are.

Option B: Try to manipulate the collection of brain blobs, by adding
new ones, feeding them garbled information, or renetworking them.

Option C: Try to study how Option B relates to relationships in the
"real world".

Example: I sent the email archived at

http://gathatoulie.blogspot.com/2007/08/absolutely-fake-burroughs.html

to an ex-girlfriend. She has not written back to anything I have sent
to her in a long time. I don't really have any reason to think that
she will write back to this particular email. I assume that she
generally disapproves of me and what I am doing. Still, I want to get
a modicum of happy juice flowing to the brain centers that were
associated with her, or maybe I mean, to ones that were one order
removed from those centers. So, I post the text on the internet and
send a link to you to see if perhaps you will enjoy it. If you don't
care for it, then I guess I write it off as a social loss and settle
for my own intrinsic enjoyment together with this post-hoc use/value.

Indeed, the text itself illustrates another point that I found
sympathy for in Burroughs, which is: to see what happens when you take
some textual structure, break it into little pieces, and look at
relationships that form between these pieces. I was first doing this
with my card game.

There are some problems with that approach, or at least, challenges.
First of all, often times no one large structure easily emerges from a
collection of snippets. This is probably OK if you are willing to
allow a subjective or aesthetic interpretation. However, if you want
to generate some particular "rhetorical" structure out of the
snippets, there will be organizing work to do.

Actually, "analysis" really means "taking things apart into little
pieces", so it may be that this approach is a very generally useful
one -- and any alleged "problems" are actually just "challenges".
(Although: one should assume that sometimes an "analytical" approach
may not be the right one to take.)

In any event: using cards or literary characters to "simulate" or
"stage" interactions only goes so far. (Note: the brain is itself
"simulational", at least in the Minsky-style formulation above, but
the human organism needs real inputs to be able to function.) I think
that we should study how and when simulation (and simulacra) fails.

Which can serve here as set up for the observation that Burroughs and
Baudrillard are both inspired by Korzybski. Korzybski also wrote a
large book that is sitting on my coffee table. (I've paged through it
at the library earlier.) I do not know exactly what his current
standing or status is in contemporary culture. But I can try to find
out.