feasts of the passover

"The cause of the final plague, the death of the first borns of Egypt,
has been suggested as being caused by a fungus that may have poisoned
the grain supplies, of which male first born would have had first
pickings and so been first to fall victim."

"... with man hu meaning "this is plant lice", which fits one
widespread modern identification of manna, the crystallized honeydew
of certain scale insects. In the environment of a desert, such
honeydew rapidly dries due to evaporation of its water content,
becoming a sticky solid, and later turning whitish, yellowish, or
brownish; honeydew of this form is considered a delicacy in the Middle
East, and is a good source of carbohydrates."

"The speculation that manna was an entheogen, also paralleled in
Philip K. Dick's posthumously published The Transmigration of Timothy
Archer, is supported in a wider cultural context when compared with
the praise of soma in the Rigveda, Mexican praise of teonanácatl, the
peyote sacrament of the Native American Church, and the holy ayahuasca
used in the ritual of the União do Vegetal and Santo Daime
churches..."

learning to fly (ESR vs FWN)

and yet we possess nothing but metaphors for
things–metaphors which correspond in no way to the
original entities.

With creative pleasure it throws metaphors into confusion
and displaces the boundary stones of abstractions, so
that, for example, it designates the stream as "the moving
path which carries man where he would otherwise walk."

These features suggest that the customs are not
accidental, but are products of some kind of implicit
agenda or generative pattern in the open-source culture
that is utterly fundamental to the way it operates.

demotic french

Unreal City
Under the brown fog of a winter noon

"Eugenides" means "well bred", but this is belied by his actions: a
blatant homosexual invitation at the Cannon Street Hotel (in the City,
a terminus to the Continent), followed by a dirty weekend in Brighton,
the Metropole then a fashionable hotel. Eliot had originally written:
"And perhaps a weekend at the Metropole", implying that the invitation
forms the poet's unspoken thoughts as to what might follow the
luncheon; Pound wrote "dam per'apsez" in the margin of the manuscript,
and underlined the offending word.

- T S Eliot: 'The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock' and 'The Waste
Land', by C. J. Ackerley

concept formation (on truth and lies)

Fred said:

"Every word immediately becomes a concept, inasmuch as it is not
intended to serve as a reminder of the unique and wholly individualized
original experience to which it owes its birth, but must at the same
time fit innumerable, more or less similar cases -- which means,
strictly speaking, never equal -- in other words, a lot of unequal
cases. Every concept originates through our equating what is unequal."

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%9Cber_Wahrheit_und_L%C3%BCge_im_au%C3%9Fermoralischen_Sinn

disjecta membra

1. Gregory Bateson - "digital versus analogic"

Bateson describes the speech of cats (and dolphins, and others) in
terms of something called μ-functions, which are communicational moves
that describe relationship. "Mew" means "dependency"!

But more generally an analogue *depicts* relationship, does it not?
ἀναλογία : "proportion"...

And I think it's safe to say that communication *of* the relationship
is concomitant in maintaining the relationship. If the cat said, "and
don't forget to take out the trash," then we would not only be
surprised, but more than mildly offended.

For Bateson, humans are unique among animals in their digitality,
which provides the ability to refer to discrete things rather than to
take part in "voicing" the relationship.

(Are you with me so far?)

2. Georges Bataille - sacrificial economy

Bataille considers variations on the theme of "potlatch". His idea is
that that expenditure is at the root of our economic systems. This is
taken up by Jean Baudrillard who argues that the *symbolic* order
comes directly from expense and destruction. In the first place, the
"sacred" is whatever is sacrificed. But it goes further than that.

Economics in these regimes is about maintaining relationships -
between the chiefs and those they lean on, and among the chieftain
class itself. Economics achieves a certain form of analogue
communication. A potlatch demands a return potlatch. A sacrifice to
the ancestors puts one into direct relationship to the ancestors.

The "symbolic" is therefor, roughly speaking, the world of
μ-functions: and of course, within this space there are all manner of
relational things that can be communicated, e.g. "I am your senior
adult male, you puppy!" (among wolves).

This adds some depth to a statement like this one:

"'Symbol' becomes a trope for a component of social practice rather
than the hinge for a theory of meaning."

3. Terrence Deacon - emergent orders

Now, it no coincidence that expenditure and destruction is the
fundamental form in "primative" societies, because it is the
fundamental form in general. In "civilized" societies, we have simply
become more efficient at it. What might this mean?

(a) First, according to Baudrillard, we have largely destroyed, or at
least neutralized, the symbolic order. What this means is that
everything is "coded" or digital. Disjecta membra rather than relata
refero perhaps (scattered fragments, as with the limbs of a dead poet
-- versus referring to things related, if only to highlight their
strangeness). In terms of Deacon's theory, what does this mean? It
means a new higher-order constraint that insists on thingness,
indexicality, graspability, familiarity, fungibility, usability, and
intelligibility.

Virtual reality triumphs over the vision quest.

(b) And so things are accelerated. Instead of mixing sugar and water
and waiting for the sugar to dissolve, one drinks Coca Cola.^*
Nevertheless, the concern with this sort of emergence is that it will
ultimately destroy itself. The whirl-pool is the fastest way to drain
the tub. According to Deacon's theory, life is supposed to put in
*additional* higher order constraints to allow the heightened form of
entropy to be sustained. Because no one has time to wait an entire
generation for change anymore, we invent things like peeragogy.

But apart from the question as to whether "we" (or anything) will
survive, there is another interesting question to ponder in the mean
time: is there hope in any of this for a neo-primitivist order, a new
symbolism, real relationship, etc.?

4. Martin Heidegger - whither relationship?

Mathematical things are "things, insofar as we learn them; things
insofar as we take cognizance of them as what we already know them to
be in advance, the body as the bodily, the plant-like of the plant,
the animal-like of the animal, and so on."

"And so on" means -- the human-like of the human, and the very
mathematical of the mathematical itself.

And this mathematical of the mathematical is the one thing that is
essential to the proper functioning of emergent orders. This is the
function we call "learning." And what is this? ...... Is it perhaps a
strange sort of μ function?

The way Heidegger puts it, learning is a kind of "taking where he who
takes only takes what he basically already has." It is a form of
direct seeing in the world -- a way of relating to the world as it is.
I think it would be OK to say, optimistically: a way of relating to
the world AS relationship, a way of apprehending the world itself as
an emergent order.

(One acknowledges that this is somewhat strange feature to observe in
something that went digital long before digital was cool.)

5. William Burroughs - language is a virus

In this note, I have traced the evolution of language from the cat's
meow to modern mathematics -- in a very schematic form, to be sure.
The question that remains is whether there are relationships within
the particular μ function that is mathematics, whether we can find
*within* this form further "endogenous" μ-functions. Are there
mathematical forms that voice their relationship with other
mathematical forms, to us, or to anything else?

One naive answer would be "category theory." But there is another
more interesting answer, which is that mathematics is, in effect, the
entire "DNA" of what we have learned. Except, this is not quite
right. It would be better to say that *we* are *its* RNA. We
replicate it, and expand it, and unfold it. We give voice to it in
the same way that "mew" gives voice to the relationship between cat
and human. In brief, yes, there are μ functions within mathematics:
for mathematicians, they are, quite literally, the stories of our
lives.

*: Bergson: "Though our reasoning on isolated systems may imply that
their history, past, present, and future, might be instantaneously
unfurled like a fan, this history, in point of fact, unfolds itself
gradually, as if it occupied a duration like our own. If I want to mix
a glass of sugar and water, I must, willy nilly, wait until the sugar
melts."

just browsing

"For books that enter Google Books through the Library Project, what
you see depends on the book's copyright status. We respect copyright
law and the tremendous creative effort authors put into their work. If
the book is in the public domain and therefore out of copyright, you
can page through the entire book and even download it and read it
offline. But if the book is under copyright, and the publisher or
author is not part of the Partner Program, we only show basic
information about the book, similar to a card catalog, and, in some
cases, a few snippets -- sentences of your search terms in context. The
aim of Google Books is to help you discover books and assist you with
buying them or finding a copy at a local library. It's like going to a
bookstore and browsing -- with a Google twist."

virtual argumentation (untaken notes)

Baudrillard:

«[J]ust as Mallarmé said that a throw of the dice would never abolish
chance -- which is to say that there would never be a final throw of
the die that, through its automatic perfection, would put an end to
chance -- so one can hope that virtual programming will never abolish
events.»

Hutto:

«In this model the clinic could become a virtual model of the
patient's workplace or home and the construction of such virtual
environments in a clinical setting could introduce novel (more
thoroughly embodied/enactive and environmentally informed) aspects to
the therapeutic process.» - "Embodied cognition and body
psychotherapy: the construction of new therapeutic environments"

Me:

0: (Permitted and encouraged.) Virtue, Wisdom; what the philosophers
seek to teach. (Related to the idea of a prima causa.)

1: (Permitted but discouraged.) Vice, as distinct from sin or crime.
(Do not worship false idols; or phrased positively, study cosmic principles.)

2: (Required and encouraged.) Using the common currency, speaking
the common language. (Study the liberal arts.)

3: (Required but discouraged.) Social transformation through
deviation from the norm. (There is a time for all things under the
sun.)

Hayles:

The Illusion of Autonomy and the Fact of Recursivity: Virtual
Ecologies, Entertainment, and "Infinite Jest"
New Literary History
Vol. 30, No. 3, Ecocriticism (Summer, 1999), pp. 675-697

Aberdein:

«Virtue theory originates in ethics, and in particular the work of
Aristotle. In recent years, it has come to be applied to other fields
of philosophy, most conspicuously epistemology. There are two main
constituencies among virtue epistemologists, distinguished by their
different characterizations of virtue. Reliabilists understand virtues
to be reliable faculties, such as sight or logical inference. For
responsibilists virtues are acquired character traits, such as
open-mindedness or intellectual humility.» - In Defence of Virtue: The
Legitimacy of Agent-Based Argument Appraisal

Lenin (as quoted in "The Big Lebowski"): "You look for the person who
will benefit."